Blood Status
by meldahlie
Summary: "There are other wand makers," said Lupin. "But Ollivanders was the best." Who were these other wand makers? Where were they? And what happened to them in the War? A self-confessed snarky Slytherin tells her own story... (DH)
1. Pure Blood

Chapter 1. Pure Blood 

"Blood Status?" I stared at the man across the shop counter. "Are- are you a Healer?"

He had introduced himself as a Ministry Official from some registration committee or other – the Ministry often has such short-lived stunts for magical businesses – and we had been through what my name was, and exactly how you spell Thaklia Coburg-Drury, and my date of birth, and whether I was the proprietor, and what I was doing here since I wasn't –_ I'm his daughter, I run the shop end of our wand making business_ – but this?

"Are you from St. Mungo's?" I queried. It was eleven months since I'd been discharged from St. Mungo's after a three week stay with a nasty case of blood poisoning, and the Healers had said on their follow-up house call that I was definitely cured and they wouldn't need to check on me any more.

"Blood status has nothing to do with your health," the man snapped, unreasonably as far as I could see. How was I to know? I'd never heard the term before – St. Mungo's seemed a pretty valid guess. "The latest developments in research from the Department of Mysteries," he ploughed on as if reciting a set text, "has proved that the level of valid magical ability in any witch or wizard is directly related to their lineage. Your Blood Status is either pure, if you are descended purely from magical ancestors in the last five generations, or half-blood, if it has been- _diluted_ – by non-magical blood in that time-span. All other magical ability is invalid."

Invalid? My mind stalled, but the man pointed the tip of his quill at me again. "So you are...?"

"Er-"

I am a Coburg-Drury. And Coburg-Drurys are wand makers, members of an odd sector of the wizarding population who tend to marry only their own relations engaged in the same occupation, and never their rivals. Ollivanders marry Ollivanders, or their distant connections the Fartreggs of Orkney, who've long since given up making wands. A similar alliance exists between McDougal's of Edinburgh and Dunlonan's of Dublin. On the continent, the Gregorovichs were once such a large tribe they only married each other, and Joder's of Bavaria marry Joders and their side-branch the Coburgs. At this point we, the Coburg-Drurys, are connected to them, and so three surnames feature on our family tree: Joder, Coburg, and Coburg-Drury. They're all wizards – they're all wand makers, actually. I supposed that made me–

"Pure blood." I smiled at his scowl, in an attempt to be appeasing. "From Slytherin."

He grunted, and I felt my usual prickle of annoyance. Just because we weren't Ollivanders, just because the sign on the shop front only says '**Established 1094 AD' **- there was no need to be so bloody snobbish. The Sorting Hat said I had every quality necessary for Slytherin and put me there, and the entire of my extended, apparently 'pure blood,' family says that I take after the Drurys, who are as Norman English as any of the other stuck-up 'old-familied' Slytherins. Like the Malfoys.

We just happen to run a business. And to have had to preserve the name by marrying out into Germany.

I favoured him with the smile that I usually use for snobbish Ministry idiots – the little, pompous, just-out-of-Hogwarts ones. "Anything else?"

"Who else is on the premises?"

The accompanying glare was really quite threatening – I switched back to the appeasing smile.

"My younger brother. He's an apprentice wand maker. Do you need to see him?"

The man looked at me for a minute as if_ I_ was the idiot. "Yes..." he hissed.

I didn't quite like to turn my back – Ministry official or not – so I shuffled backwards from the counter to the workshop door. "There's a gentleman to see you," I called hastily over one shoulder, and stepped back to the counter again. "He might be a minute if he's in the middle of something."

Another grunt, and the man folded his arms and gazed about the shop in an appraising manner I didn't much like – rather the way my great-great-aunts check for cobwebs in every corner when they come to visit. There weren't cobwebs – I'd swept this morning – and it's a nice shop, a big square shop with two bay windows and a tiled floor, and shelves with wand boxes covering both side walls. I leaned on my side of the big teak counter that spans the back of the shop, and tried to look imposing. _Hurry up, little brother._

He glanced at me scornfully. "Do you do a lot of business, with a shop this big?"

Merlin's beard. If our shop reflected the size of our average annual turnover I'd be presiding over a kitchen cupboard. Coburg-Drury's sells wands to witches and wizards whose families buy Coburg-Drury wands, because they buy Coburg-Drury wands, because that's just what they do. There aren't that many of them. The other reason for our limited clientèle is that we're not on Diagon. We're in Kentish Town.

I know, you've never heard of Kentish Town. Most of the muggle-borns haven't, either – their 'guides' from Hogwarts just take them to Diagon and plonk them at Ollivanders, and that's the end of the matter. Which _is_ perfectly sufficient – if you want anything magical, you can probably get it on Diagon Alley, and if you want anything dodgy, you can go round to Knockturn.

Kentish Town is – different. When I'm preserving a proper degree of wizarding pride, I say it's specialist, more exclusive; but frankly, it's just – different. You get in from the muggle Kentish Town, just like Diagon off Tottenham Court Road, via the shabby little newsagents behind the big brick Victorian monstrosity that is, apparently, a muggle public baths – why ever muggles want to take baths in public.

To a muggle, Coultt's is a newsagents, that sells a few tatty tabloid papers and has ancient adverts for glass-bottled Coca-Cola in its windows. They somehow miss the quills, parchment, ink, blank books – and sets of mildly hexed stationary that turn your hands green or give you hiccups, for those so childishly inclined, like my little brother. They somehow miss Mr Coultt's cat Marmaduke – although I wouldn't mind sharing that with them: I don't like cats or kneazles at the best of times, and huge ginger ones that are too big, too clever, and can probably talk are really not my thing. And above all, the muggles somehow miss the big, green-curtained archway at the back of the shop which, if brushed with your wand, opens.

Opens onto The Court, Kentish Town.

It's not as long as Diagon – a narrow cobbled street of Elizabethan half-timbered shops down to Coburg-Drury's Wand-makers at Number 17, where it opens out into a small square with the largest surviving elm tree in London at the centre. The muggle Dutch Elm Disease didn't stand much chance against a good beetle repelling charm, although I do wonder why anybody bothered, when I'm sweeping slushy rotting leaves off the shop floor incessantly each autumn. Most of the names over the shops date from the 15th century founders, but if they meant to rival Diagon, they failed.

Our magical backwater has been most popular with successive generations of refugees from continental wizarding wars, most recently Grindelwald. This is why the Lenoir family make 'Fine Robes for Wizarding Gentry' at Buckleton & Prenn, Stradivaria Corbellini runs the magical equipment suppliers Tailby & Bowes, Colly & Grout's second-hand bookshop belongs to the Van Dykes, and Mr & Mrs Nydowski still shout at each other in Polish behind the bar of the 'Four Slugs' pub at the very back of the square.

Perhaps the phrase is 'cosmopolitan' – and I realised I had quite forgotten my visiting Ministry Official in my mental ramblings.

Perhaps he thought I was mentally totting up our entire sales figures for the past six months. The year before last, I could have done that. In about five seconds flat. But I wasn't going to reveal our private financial affairs to some pompous twit from the Ministry – I do have some proper wizarding pride. If you are from a Kentish Town family, you are from a Kentish Town family, and we all keep the side up.

I looked at him disdainfully. "We have been a little busier since Ollivanders closed."

A little busier? We'd never actually seen anything like it. Ollivanders are, after all, _the_ wand-makers. There – I'm a Coburg-Drury and I've said it. But it's a fact: almost everybody uses their wands. As I discovered aged fifteen – up until then I'd only vaguely noticed that all my classmates hadn't chosen their wands in our shop – when a couple of our Joder cousins came for Christmas, and took me out to several 'smart parties'. Their party trick (in lieu of any even mildly intelligent conversation) at home in Bavaria was to reel off what wands people had. It's quite easy to guess, really, based on height and build and the things people say – wand woods and cores tend to match distinctive characteristics.

_But it depends on knowing the style of the predominant wand-maker..._

The best you can say of that occasion is that my cousins weren't quitters: they guessed _everybody, _one at a time, **wrong,** while I stood there and died of Slytherin shame. That's the problem with smart parties – they don't even give you any chairs. Neither to hide under, nor to get the pleasure of playing Magical Chairs and seeing your evening's partner sit down in the seat that's just about to be vanished.

At any rate, when Mr Ollivander vanished, we got more customers than I had ever seen, had continued to get a stream of adult witches and wizards needing repairs and replacement wands throughout the year, and – although it was only the start of August and shops in general were agreed to be struggling with the nasty 'security situation' – we were doing pretty good business again this summer.

Officialdom did not sound impressed. He grunted. "Those big window are a security risk."

Now he sounded exactly like the great-great-aunts with the cobwebs. When they can't find anything wrong, they tell you something you're doing is going to lead to it. You know the sort of comment: "A rug on a polished floor? You'll slip!" – regardless of the sticking charms holding it down. But even great-great-aunt Elisaveta could have been more imaginative than our _windows_ being a _security risk_. The things have more generations of anti-shatter charms on them than a Gringotts vault...

He swung his gaze back to me when I didn't bother to reply. "Do you live here?"

_Merlin's-!_ I hastily reminded myself he probably didn't know that was insulting. Perhaps due to the history of refugee status of most new arrivals, the aim of anyone running a business in Kentish Town is to make enough to money to move elsewhere. We keep running our shops here, of course – but only the roughest, toughest and poorest actually _live _in Kentish Town. Coburg-Drury's 'made it' generations ago – while we were still the original name of Drury's, in fact, and have a very nice Family House with all proper muggle excluding charms, in Kingston.

I looked at him sourly. "No." _Where the heck was my wretched brother?_

"Then how does your father run this place if he doesn't live here?"

"My father," I snapped with offended dignity, "is in his nineties and consequently semi-retired. The majority of the wand-making is now the responsibility of-"

"Me," said the surly, juvenile and ungrammatical voice behind me.

If only Meck would occasionally manage not to look _quite_ so sixteen years younger than myself. He came of age four years ago. You can do the calculations. This morning, that particular set of pale blue robes were making him look a very immature sixteen at the most. Which made the – Ministry official's – glare even more suspicious. _"Age?"_

Meck blinked. It used to be cute when he was little. "Twenty one," he said, in an innocent but puzzled tone. "Why–"

The official scribbled it down. "And your name?"

"Mecklenburg Adolphus Jorgmann Coburg-Drury."

Meck got every traditional name that had to be carried on in the family. It just sounds as if it was made up to be awkward – particularly reeled off like that – and there wasn't really any need to give the _whole _thing. I mean, I'm Thaklia Alexandrina Lucretia Coburg-Drury – but I hadn't smacked the poor official over the head with the whole thing. I glared at Meck as well – which was probably why he waited just long enough for it to be rude before enquiring: "D'you want it spelled?"

The official quill paused, considered, and apparently deciding to overlook the delay and any meaning therein, asked coldly: "One 'n' or two?"

"Three!" There was an awful pause. "One in 'Mecklenburg' and two in 'Jorgmann,'" Meck elaborated in an slightly over-done air of innocence.

The quill scratched fiercely. "Blood status?"

"Blood?" Definitely the bewildered schoolboy now. "It was Lia who had the blood poisoning last year."

Officialdom scowled with sudden suspicion. "Leah?" he demanded.

"Meaning me," I interrupted hastily, with my most appeasing smile. "Short for Thak-li-a..."

I got a nasty glare for my pains, before he turned back to Meck. I attempted to catch my brother's eye, but he was either transfixed by the official, or just plain refusing to look at me. Meck is very good at saying he didn't see me trying to look a message at him._ Really, at this rate the chap was going to permanently suspect us of having hundreds of under-age muggle borns hidden in the premises..._

"She was bitten by a fanged geranium, you see," Meck added unhelpfully.

_Great. Make that a houseful of under-age muggle borns with made up names who made ridiculous excuses. _

I mean, who gets blood poisoning from a fanged geranium? That was what the reception witch at 's had said when I'd gone in with it, but as I was turning a nastier shade of orange every minute, she'd been obliged to admit that I _did_ have a problem. The healers had said it was a highly unusual case – one of the trainee healers had written me up as special case study.

"Blood status...?" the official repeated, fortunately with the air of a man trying to finish interviewing a hopeless imbecile rather than a suspicious criminal.

"Whether you're descended from a magical family or not, Meck," I prompted. _Please, oh please..._

"Why?"

"It was in the Prophet this morning," the man snapped. "Pure blood, half blood, or mud blood?"

Mud blood? _I_ blinked. That was a dreadful way to put it.

"Pure blood," said Meck slowly. "if you count Coburg-Drury for eight generations and Joder's for twenty since we started counting as being pure..."

"Right." The official rolled his parchment shut with a snap – obviously the new registration committee didn't believe in saying 'thank you' – and fixed us both with a fierce glare. "New regulations regarding the control of wands. It is illegal to sell wands to anybody without proven Blood Status. Or to any part-humans: werewolves, metamorphmagi, giants, veela... You understand?"

"Yes," I said quickly before Meck could say anything. I _didn't_ understand Blood Status, really – but we were never likely to be selling wands to werewolves, legal or not. Our parents had been in uproar when it had got out about a werewolf teaching at Hogwarts. The fact that I had been at school with the werewolf didn't bother anybody – it was that _if _Meck had gone to Hogwarts and _if_ he had studied NEWT Defence and _if_ he had had to re-take a year, he, the son-and-heir, could have been _taught_ by a _werewolf..._ In our parents' eyes, that was about the same as being savaged by one.

"And you must record the name, address and Blood Status of anyone purchasing a wand, for the Ministry to inspect – you're on the front line of eliminating this thef– invalid use of magic. Understand?"

"Yes!" I nodded and smiled desperately at the fierce glare, for out of the corner of my eye I could see Meck's most argumentative expression developing. "We'll get a book and start recording, this afternoon, most certainly–"

I was cut off by his abrupt turn on one heel. At the door, he looked back: "If there are further measures, you'll be informed! And monitored!" And the door slammed.

I started at the beginning: "What took you so long?!"

Meck's Very Argumentative Expression hadn't lifted. "I was listening."

"You were listening to the wireless while I'm waiting for you with a Ministry Official!" I exploded. "You are meant to keep _one_ ear out for me calling! For all you knew it could have been a customer! I really-"

"I was listening to you and him," said Meck with suspicious simplicity.

"You were _what?"_

"Listening to you and the Ministry Official. So I knew what to say."

As if that explained anything! "Well, you didn't need to be so bloody unhelpful!" I shouted.

"I answered his questions," said the persistent picture of innocence

"Giving all your names, and telling him about my blood poisoning, and all! He'll suspect us of something for evermore!"

"Well, that's not my fault," Meck objected, switching from innocence to his other talent of devastating counter-attack. "You sounded far more suspicious than me – nodding and smiling and coo-ing all over him, like you either fancied him or wanted to get him out of the shop 'cause you were up to something."

"I- I- rubbish!"

Meck is the same height as me, so we glared at each other eye to eye. I wondered exactly how many million times we had done this since Meck learned to glare.

You may think I do not appreciate my little brother. I do. I always have done. His arrival very neatly put out of joint the noses of several of our Bavarian cousins, who had taken it for granted that they would have to come to England, marry me and carry on the business. I had never particularly liked Willem or Schlewing, the two rival candidates, and as for putting up with them as a permanency... well, a little brother _had_ seemed easier.

It had been fun – the owl, the announcement in the Prophet, even Professor Slughorn taking note of me for the first and only occasion in my academic career, jovially giving me permission to go home and see my new brother, and going so far as to give me the "homework" of bringing a photograph of the "little chap" back to show him.

Nobody else was impressed. At the age of sixteen, all the other witches I knew had big brothers and sisters, all engaged in getting engaged, and married, and rendering people aunts and uncles – simple sisterhood had long since lost any social appeal. I retired back into the woodwork.

Meck was cute up to the age of two. After that, less so. He points out that this was the age at which I, having finished Hogwarts, became an influence in his life.

The son-and-heir, of course, could not be risked on the certainty of fatal fwooping cough, potions poisoning and broomstick accidents that make up daily life at Hogwarts. Which is why I, not having anything else to do, got to teach him. The primary stuff was fun, because he learned fast and read anything, which meant I could set him off in a book and then read myself without the slightest pang of conscience – Slytherins don't have much of that anyway. Teaching him magic, with the vision of Slughorn and McGonagall and Flitwick all peering over my shoulder, was more nerve-racking, but I soldiered on until we got to fourth-year Transfiguration.

I had produced a guinea pig – Meck was meant to be producing a guinea fowl. We spent all morning on it, by which time I knew that either he was stupid – he's not – or I was an incompetent teacher – pride hurting.

We still had our guinea pig.

I suppose I lost my temper. I turned the wretched animal into a budgie, and said, in a voice dripping with sarcasm: "Do you think you could _possibly_ reduce that to a black _beetle_, or might that be too _taxing...?_"

Moral: never use sarcasm when teaching little brothers.

Meck raised his wand and with a fine taxing of his magical powers produced not one but two creatures – a budgidor and a labraderiar.

The budgidor wasn't too much of a problem – a black, hairy flightless bird that barks is startling but at least restricted to ground travel. The labraderiar, on the other hand, cheeped alarmingly, and had a massive set of green and yellow wings it was apparently created knowing how to use – it took off at great speed round the house.

Meck wanted to give it a name, and have it as a pet. We gave it away, and got him a tutor instead. Unfortunately, this still meant I had provided him with half his magical education, and about 70% of his total – enough for it always to be all my fault.

That was what his tutors thought, too. Plural. One per year. Nobody ever said I'd done well for having managed three and half years of angelic curls and devilish ability. They just said I hadn't disciplined him early enough – that was the fifth year woman for whom Meck would never sit still. He was just trying it on, of course – he could sit still perfectly well, he was _fifteen,_ for Merlin's sake. He sat perfectly still at the shabby little offices of the Wizarding Examination Authority, under the augustly forbidding eye of Griselda Marchbanks herself – who doesn't approve of home-tutoring people because they 'are over indulged and under perform', as she was kind enough to tell me – and got ten straight 'O's for OWL and four straight 'O's for NEWT.

It was, of course, the cleverest thing ever achieved and also entirely to be expected. And, as far as I could see, entirely irrelevant. He was the son-and-heir. That made him apprentice by default – under performing or not.

He was certainly performing well as an apprentice – he'd learned quickly enough in four years for our father to be able to turn most of the work over to him, and just 'supervise Meck's studies' from the comfort of his own reading-room at home. And I have to admit it is probably just as well, because father, now ninety-one, would never have coped with the sheer volume of work last summer, and would certainly have been very unhappy with extra Ministry regulations. With Meck in the shop, things move faster.

You are probably wondering what I am doing here – and it is _not_ actually just keeping an eye on Meck. When I quit teaching him, I didn't want to just hang around our house, avoiding Meck and the latest tutor. In 'Old Families' like ours, daughters are expected to either marry young, or if they're daring, 'have a career.' Meck had saved me from the first of those, so I exerted my Slytherin cunning, and persuaded father to let me join him in the shop. I wouldn't have minded training as a wand-maker, but professional consensus and family tradition states that wand-makers are _only_ men. Besides, Meck was born to do it, and we certainly don't have enough business for two of us making wands. So I'm manager – which is, frankly, a whole lot more fun than being apprentice because I never have to study. I just manage, everything from the ordering of supplies to the cleaning – the Control of Wand Use Regulations forbid the presence of non-wand-bearers in a wand-makers shop. I bet Amos Diggory's never had to scrub a floor...

But the fact remains: I know a lot more about running this place than any cocky apprentice. I said so.

Meck snorted. "But do they know about running the country?" He turned.

"If you could just _try_ and remember they have the power to close us down," I urged desperately.

Meck opened the door to the inner sanctum of the workshop. "Then they shouldn't have," he flung back without looking round.

A door slammed for the second time that day. And only then did I remember that Meck's 'girlfriend' was – muggleborn.


	2. Mud Blood

_A/N: Opinions of the narrator are Not always those of the author – particularly those regarding James Potter & Co!_

Chapter 2. Mud Blood 

I should, of course, have seen it coming. Meck has – has always had – the habit of doing things so awful and original that we never, ever guess them – like the time aged three he climbed sweetly onto great-great-aunt Elisaveta Coburg's visiting-from-Bavaria knee, and promptly bit her – but after twenty-one years I should, at least, be prepared for something originally awful.

Of course, I wasn't. I took myself out that afternoon to Mr Coultt's and bought a nice, dragon-hide-bound blank book in a tasteful shade of green, and then occupied myself in worrying about it.

To take down this "Blood Status" of everybody who bought wands? The sheer logistics sounded frightful, never mind the implications of what they were going to do with it, and why the new Minister was worried about such things at all. You see, the reason a wand shop is always empty when you go into it, with no other customers, is that there is a customer spacing charm on the premises. If you try to come into our shop when someone else is in there, you will most certainly remember some other urgent business you must see to before coming back in an hour. It's set on a hour – we never used to have many customers. Last year, of course, we suddenly did – and it was a pretty tight schedule getting them all through in time, with several parents being pretty irate at having been helplessly popping up and down in Kentish Town at hourly intervals until seven or eight at night. If I had to add taking their Blood details, and then hours going over the list with a – ministry official – we'd still be selling wands mid-September.

So I didn't notice. Didn't notice that Meck now frowned permanently – everybody you came across these days looked worried. The only people who looked otherwise were the- well, Death Eaters, I suppose. Or collaborators, or accomplices, or compromisers, or Quislings, or whatever you're meant to call those who look bloody smug that the government _appears_ to have fallen, and the enemy _appears_ to have taken over, and wide scale magical purging _appears_ to be taking place, and the newspaper _appears_ to now be only propaganda, and it only _appears_ because you can't prove anything. All I could prove is that I got a – probable – Death Eater in my shop every other day.

I thought that was why Meck kept disappearing out.

I didn't notice that he read the Daily Prophet every breakfast time – this was my little brother to whom I once mistakenly remarked that there _was _more to life than the Quidditch pages. I have never been able to read the Prophet in Meck's company again – it is always suddenly summoned off me and returned, folded to the front page, with the casual remark that there _was_ more to life than the sport, or fashion, or gossip, or editorial, or whatever-else-I-might-have-been-reading-pages. If you hang onto a newspaper that's being summoned, you find yourself clutching two ripped out, crumpled semi-circles.

I didn't notice that he wasn't discussing complicated wand-lore with our father every dinner time – a trick Meck's done ever since he became the apprentice, just so that we know he's very clever and above such mundane female discussions as the weather and whether we could occasionally get a word in edgewise. He ate silently, while Mother and I discussed the weather and the recent changes of any importance: some shops that had closed down; the change of the WWN classical music programme's theme tune to a very traditional composition by a magical composer; a couple of new writers at _Witch Weekly_. Apart from their having to write 'wand maker,' 'Coburg-Drury' and 'Joder' as occupation and names for five generations back on a pair of 'Blood Status Registration Forms', the change of government had not really troubled our parents.

Father lives mainly in a semi-retired world of his own in the reading-room, with piles of books on wand lore; his main input had been to pass Meck the _Prophet_, and remark that one Minister or another didn't make much difference. Mother is a quarter of a century younger, and since Meck's arrival, has devoted her life to wrapping Father up in thistledown. She doesn't read the _Prophet _– she worries whether the house-elf's dusted the reading-room and ironed the paper properly.

I hadn't told them about the Ministry Official and the blood status book. I just hadn't got round to it, and –

Father would 'humph' dismissively, and tell me not to bother, the Ministry never cared to check up on Coburg-Drury's or any other business in Kentish Town, and besides, such schemes always die out soon. In less than two weeks, the official had been back four times. Mother would pat my hand sympathetically, and tell me if that was what the Ministry said, I was doing the right thing – 'don't worry so, darling.' She has given up telling me not to frown because I'll get wrinkles and spoil my face – with Meck's safe arrival at apprentice-able age, my looks and prospects no longer matter – but 'doing the right thing' would be even more annoying.

Was I doing the right thing? Slytherins are cunning where Gryffindors are self-righteous (if you don't believe me, you didn't go to Hogwarts with James Potter's awful gang) – but that just leaves us open to hordes of self-doubt when uncertain. The absence of any such uncertainty in Meck is what causes me occasionally to say he reminds me of 'Potter & Co' – with their queer definition of 'chivalry' that put all Slytherins on the list of targets. My brother just grins, stretches and remarks that he doesn't feel like he's dead. I certainly wasn't asking Meck's views on the matter.

I filled in the book. Name and Blood Status for each customer, fewer than last year, and got varying degrees of uncomfortable or uncertain looks back. The few members of the bloody smug class who pushed their child forwards with an odious leer of 'Pure Blood' – as if they thought I wasn't – should have been easier. But weren't, because Meck took up slamming the workshop door after them, and then they looked at _me _suspiciously. According to the _Prophet_, all these measures were to promote community security, but as far as I could see, suspicion was the main fruit so far.

Because _everyone_ was looking at me suspiciously: the customers when I asked them for their Blood Status; the Dea- _official – _when I reported an apparently complete lack of interest in buying wands on the part of the magically Undesirable (we'd progressed from Invalid); Meck when I'd got shut of the Death Eater every other day; and half the other shopkeepers in Kentish Town. The Van Dykes, Number 16 exactly opposite, were still friendly – make that _very friendly – _ but Mr Coultt seemed distant, Madam Nydowski cool, and when I met a pair of the Lenoir daughters in the street, they both fixed their eyes on a point two inches to the side of, and three thousand miles past, my left ear and went by without speaking. Until I was past – when I'm fairly sure one of them murmured 'collaborator.'

Whinging _schneider_! And they don't even _own _their business – a distant and retired Prenn still leases 'Buckleton & Prenn' to that bunch of Grindelwald refugees!

You see – I had other things to distract me from noticing the early warning signs of original awfulness from my little brother.

~:~

"... Name … Address … Blood Status … ?" I reeled the questions out rather absently. After three weeks and the bulk of the August sales-for-Hogwarts they were becoming fairly familiar. Automatic, in fact, which was just as well. Just as well, because my wretched little brother, the one I had told the Death Eater was 'responsible' for the wand-making business, had put on his cloak after lunch and Gone Out. Stuff the shop, stuff the customers, stuff any moral support I might have wanted for dealing with the Death Eater who was probably going to turn up later... with complete disregard for my protests, Meck had simply walked out.

Two hours later three customers had come in. Well, only one customer, really – the usual little wide-eyed eleven year old, with what had to be her older brother, maybe thirteen, in a Chudley Cannons T-shirt, and her mother. I can sell wands – after all, it's the wand that chooses the witch, not the shopkeeper – but I find it annoying to do so when _somebody else_ is meant to. And now the government had put their oar in, I had paperwork to do as well...

My quill was still paused above the book. "Blood Status?" I repeated. The woman repeated their address.

"I've got that." I looked up. "Blood Status, please?"

"I – I'm sorry?" The woman was very nicely spoken, but looked completely puzzled. Merlin's beard, I wasn't in the mood for people who completely fail to keep abreast of current 'affairs' – or pretend to do so as some sort of protest stunt. Go along with it – if you don't like it, work round it with cunning: that's the Slytherin motto.

"Your Blood Status is necessary before the purchase of a wand," I elaborated condescendingly – as if she didn't know it already. If she was going to be a stubborn Gryffindor, I could work round things – and turned promptly to the little girl. Eleven year olds tend not to go in for political protest stunts. "Are your family _all_ magical, dear? Or only some of them?"

She stared at me, and pointed hesitantly at her brother. "Only Richard..."

"What?" I stepped back. "The rest of them are muggles?" They were all dressed in muggle clothes, but muggle clothes of a smart, well-spoken kind that most liberal Pure-bloods wear when they have to travel through London to Kentish Town. I'd never met a single muggle-born like this lot...

"What does who her family is have to do with buying Elaine a wand?" the woman queried irritably.

Her son scowled. "It means she thinks we're not as good as she is," he began, but his mother cut him off with a Look.

"We had a 'Professor' come two years ago, when Richard was eleven, who explained that he was magical, and had won a place at this Hogwarts School," she addressed me firmly. "They said it was likely Elaine was too, and sure enough this summer she gets a letter, that says she's got a place as well, and there's a long list of supplies to be bought. Now we've had another letter since, that wanted to confirm both the children's details before the new school year, but they still need their supplies. We've been up and down that other Alley that Richard's wand came from for hours, trying to find somewhere, before one of the young ladies in the joke shop told us we had to come here for wands now, and we really haven't any more time to waste if we're going to drive home before the rush-hour. So we would like a wand for Elaine."

She said it like that settled the matter, and my slight pity for anyone so helplessly ignorant of the whole state of affairs now vanished in a snap.

"I'm very sorry," I retorted coldly and untruthfully, "to hear of your wasted afternoon. But I cannot sell your daughter a wand, and I don't think either of your children will be going to Hogwarts this year."

"Just what do you mean by that?!" _ Great – now I had an irate muggle in my shop – ranting._ "My children's education is nothing to do with you, but do you mean that you are refusing to sell us a wand?"

"I _can't_ sell you a wand." Really, was it such a difficult concept to grasp? "It's illegal. Sale of wands to muggles is illegal."

"That's ridiculous! She had a letter-!" The woman's voice rose – her son put his oar in with "Elaine's just as magical as you are! You stuck up-!" – the little girl herself was starting to snivel – " ...and now you say you can't sell one-!"

I slammed the Blood Status book. "Muggle-borns are not considered desirable by the current government! So I'm telling you out of kindness: you are going to be in quite enough danger existing, let alone trying to send those children to Hogwarts, this year! But believe _me_, it will be far worse if it gets out that you've been in here _demanding_ to buy a wand. So I _suggest_ you leave the shop _now..." _I strode out from behind the counter and opened the door. "Good Afternoon."

The woman seized her daughter's hand and marched out without a word. Her son followed, making the sort of stupid remarks thirteen year olds make when they're trying to sound 'big': "...I'll report you for this! … insulting my mother! … nothing but an ignorant shopkeeper!... You-"

I shut the door just as the woman looked back and said "Hush, Richard. She's not worth wasting your breath on."

_She's WHAT! _I stood in the middle of my shop – our family's shop – our 'Established 1094 AD' shop – and breathed rather heavily. Merlin's Beard! In seven years working here, that had to be the most horrible experience ever – and _they_ were thinking it was _me! _In seven years, I'd never had such a batch of abusive customers!

But then – in seven years, I'd never actually refused to sell anyone a wand. The Coburg-Drury principle of business is to sell wands to anyone who can pay for them – ie, never serve anyone whose surname is, or looks like it ought to be, Fletcher, because if they do happen to have the money on them it doesn't belong to them. It was all this stupid Registration Committee's fault! – and I froze, and stared at that innocent looking green dragon-hide-bound book on the counter.

The Death Eater. And the theft of magic by Undesirables by forced acquisition of wands. I opened the book. _Elaine Cooper, The Manor House, Northcote Lane... _The name and address of an eleven-year-old Undesirable who had attempted to acquire a wand...? An incident the Death Eater would be extremely interested in – and what was I meant to do?

The Law-abiding, If-it's-what-the-Ministry-says-to-do-then-it's-right, shopkeeper said simply 'report them.' I suspected the Ministry would probably want an emergency owl on the subject, so they could start tracking dow- investigating as quickly as possible. But-?

I stood, uncertain – and there was the faint hiss of a Floo connection from the upstairs hearth. That should be a certain apprentice person – a certain person who was going to get a piece of my mind for leaving me to deal with this mess single handed...

I shot upstairs as the hearth flared green – but –Meck had gone out in black robes – and the spinning figure in the fire wore navy. Navy witch's robes... and a girl, a _girl,_ stepped out of the fire. A girl I had never, _ever_, seen before, with pale, tear-streaked face, Floo-tossed brown hair and huge dark eyes that wouldn't have looked out of place on a Holstein cow...

"Excuse me!" I snapped. I had really had quite enough difficulties with strangers for one day. "I think you've got the wrong Floo stop!"

Holstein cow? That was an insult to bovines. She let out a squeak a white mouse would have been ashamed of. "M- Meck sent me..."

_Meck?! Meck?! _

The hearth flared green again, and somebody I_ was_ expecting – now _very much_ expecting – expecting an explanation from – stepped out. _He_ didn't look startled, or troubled, or the least bit apologetic... he just grinned at the strange tableaux in front of him – his most irritating, juvenile, irresponsible grin.

"Hello, Sis! Julie, this is my sister Thaklia. Thaklia, this is Julie Lowe."

At least when Meck bit great-great-aunt Elisaveta I had the satisfaction of hauling him off her knee and spanking him soundly. When he produced the labraderiar, he got slapped. But right now, if I hexed him into the middle of next week, _I_ would be the one stuck with the white mouse.

So I glared at him. "I'm _sorry?"_

"Julie Lowe," Meck repeated all too innocently.

I turned, and Looked at the creature. Her lip trembled. "From_ where?" _ I queried icily. This – this was getting to be simply ridiculous.

"We- we've just come from th- the M-ministry," the white mouse quavered. "The h-hearing..." She sniffed, and two tears ran stupidly down her cheeks.

I stared. "The _WHAT?"_

"Umbridge's muggle-born persecution committee," Meck broke in with a snap. "They'd snapped her wand and convicted her of 'stealing magic' and were just about to turn her over to the Dementors to 'escort her off the premises.'

"So – so –" At risk of sounding like the white mouse herself, I didn't quite see what this had to do with us. "So-?"

"So I brought her here," said Meck with his most irritably charming of smiles. "You have to bring your girlfriend home to meet your family at some point, don't you?"

_Getting to be...?_

_This WAS ridiculous. _

_Ridiculously ridiculous. _

_This could simply NOT be happening._

I stared at my brother. Meck has never been led astray by close proximity and inappropriate association with people the Coburg-Drury heir should not know – but neither had he been granted much privacy to learn about the follies of friendship out of our parents' sight like I had. Which was why I had turned a blind eye to the abstract possibility of this muggle-born 'girlfriend' – who was now a weepingly concrete reality in the middle of _my_ shop.

Everyone _is_ entitled to a few foolish choices in friends – for Merlin's sake, I was once sympathetic to that little idiot of an Angela Timms for a whole term in fifth year. Until, that is, she asked me which of my cousins I was going to marry, because having 'an expected' was 'so romantic.' Romance, Willem and Schlewing are not on speaking terms – neither are Miss Timms and Miss Coburg-Drury. But the purpose of that exercise is to develop a little common sense and drop them – not to drag them home straight from being condemned by Dolores Umbridge's all powerful Muggle-born Registration Committee – the Muggle-born Registration Committee which, according to this morning's Daily Prophet, had just sent Dirk Cresswell, charming, smiling, I-went-to-school-with, protégée of Professor Slughorn, head of Goblin Liason and next-Minister-but-four, Dirk Cresswell, to Azkaban for theft of magic.

I opened my mouth to protest. If Meck had to go and be outrageous with girlfriends, couldn't he have picked Stradivaria Corbellini's niece, or one of the Lenoir girls, or – or – or somebody who at least had some _spunk?_

And- and besides, didn't she _know_ that she, a muggle-born named Lowe, had no business dating the heir of the Coburg-Drurys, who marry only their wand-making Coburg and Joder cousins-?

Except – how different was that to saying that she, a- a mud-blood, had no business dating a pure-blood? Which wasn't right. Whatever the rest of Kentish Town might think, I didn't _want_ to be a collaborator.

I hesitated – and the shop door bell rang downstairs.

_I _jumped; the white mouse jumped, and turned even whiter. Meck just grinned: "Don't worry. It's only Lia's Death Eater."

That name, by the way, is a relict of Meck's long ago infancy, when he really _couldn't_ say Thaklia, and it has long since become only dragged out to be bloody annoying. And – Death Eaters weren't things to be joked about! The mouse, quite predictably, squeaked. I jumped to my feet and glared at him. _"Mecklenburg!_ Not everybody has nerves of steel!" I paused on the landing and glanced at myself in the mirror before hurrying downstairs. Nerves of steel? I hoped _I_ had.

I opened the door into the shop – and stopped. I had forgotten to shut or move the Blood Status book when I had heard the Floo – and the Death Eater was leaning on _my_ counter, with _my_ quill, copying that address...

He looked up sharply. "Did you sell them a wand?"

"What?"

Maybe I did look stunned after all, for his voice assumed a somewhat patronising tone that might have meant to be reassuring or something. "We had a report of Undesirables leaving this shop about half an hour ago from another of our contacts, so we were onto the case right away. You didn't need to be frightened-"

_Excuse Me!_

"-but we all know what _they_ are like. Did they manage to steal a wand?"

"S-sale of wands without Blood Status is illegal," I repeated, somewhat offended, for the second time that day. I'm not stupid, thank you. "Of course not."

"But they tried to buy one?"

"They – " What was I to say? The book and the 'other contact' had fairly well condemned them. "They didn't realise they wouldn't be attending Hogwarts."

The Death Eater snorted, and made a note on his parchment. "Abusive?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Threatening? Were they threatening? Abusive? Violent?"

Nothing compared to they way he was snapping at me. "I- er- suppose – hardly..." I was going to explain they had seemed more annoyed than threatening, but he cut me off.

"But slightly?"

"Not really seriously," I retorted with dignity.

He gave another sceptical snort; I could see he was thinking I must be seriously thick. "_Any_ threat by an undesirable must be taken_ extremely_ seriously, they can be highly dangerous."

_A thirteen year old boy trying to sound big...? _I didn't think so.

"But you can rest assured, the government is dealing with them." He rolled up the parchment, and then nodded at me with a strange leer that was, perhaps, meant to be a reassuring smile. "You won't be troubled by this lot again. We'll be onto them. Don't worry."

The bell jangled. The door shut. And I stood and stared. _We'll be onto them... _That well-spoken mother? The Chudley Cannons fan? The little, bright eyed girl? _That_ was supposed to stop me worrying? And – and –

And now I was hearing things, because there was a little girl's laugh somewhere. Again, and again – but the street outside was empty, with nobody there to laugh, or answer in a low, murmuring voice – and again – and then Meck's voice answering it – upstairs...

_Surely that white mouse didn't sound like that?_

I fired a locking charm at the door and rushed back upstairs. If this most awful of days had driven me insane, I fancied some company; and if I wasn't, then I wanted to know _what_, in Merlin's name, was Going On.

I must have gone mad. Because I was seeing – not even double, but triple. Three versions of the white mouse. Three pairs of those big, dark, bovine-like eyes. It took a few everlasting seconds before I realised that one of the extra pairs belonged to a startled looking teenager clutching a kneazle, the other to a laughing little girl in a red muggle football shirt, and that my brother's distinctly cheeky blue eyes where fixed on me with a challenging glint of amusement in them.

Meck flicked his wand and the door shut behind me. "As I didn't get to finish explaining when you rushed out, I was just leaving Julie here, while I went to pick up her sisters before the Ministry could raid a convicted Undesirable's house. Their 'hearings' were due tomorrow, and they've nowhere else to go. This is Sally, she's a Gryffindor," he indicated the teenager, "and this is Pam, who hadn't started Hogwarts yet. Pam, Sally, Julie: this is Thaklia."

Pam. Sally. Julie. My poor stunned mind slowly repeated the names. They couldn't have been more muggle if they'd _tried... _You might think, given ten years between the oldest one and the youngest one, that having sent one witch to Hogwarts their parents might have suspected they'd had another and named her more appropriately – but I guess that would be expecting too much of muggle logic. A shame – because Pam at least looked like she'd known there was magic all her life – I suppose she had.

"If you've nothing to say," said Meck wickedly, "don't say it here."

There are levels of irritation that cure speechlessness. That exceeded it by about six hundred percent:

"_Ewige Verdammnis! Verdammnis und dann einige!"_

Ah – yes. Sorry. I learned that one from Schlewing when he had got the very last wand wrong at that 'smart party', and I save it up for extreme provocation. The advantage of swearing in German is that nobody knows quite what you've said – but my tone seemed to have shocked the three girls. Stuff it.

"Right." I snapped into action. There was Ridiculous and then there was _Ridiculous_, and this was definitely the latter – it usually is when Meck's involved. "Meck, go downstairs and put the shutters up-" we have shutters now, Government orders for wand security. They didn't give us a penny for the cost of them, of course, but they were going to come in handy now. Meck opened his mouth to argue, as ever, that as I was the one who'd said we'd install them, I could put them up, but I cut him off:

"-and then take Julie down there and find her a new wand."

He vanished without a word. Certain government restrictions were well past Ridiculous into Insanely Absurd, and I wasn't about to try and deal with a white mouse _totally_ helpless and incapable due to an equipment shortage.

"Can you just get a new wand?" the little – Pam – asked with interest. "I thought they took Julie's so she couldn't do magic again."

"You can't," I replied with extreme briskness, because I knew I had just told Meck not only to contemplate but commit an awful crime. "Sale of wands to muggle-borns is illegal."

Meck popped back up the stairs and grinned at that. "Thaklia likes to be above board," he remarked cheerily, offering a hand to Julie with elaborate gallantry.

"And stick to business down there," I hissed after him. I was _not_ in the mood for canoodling couples.

I looked at the clock as the door closed after them. Five o'clock. Closing time already, and that meant we had less than an hour to sort this mess out, before Meck and I would be expected to be home for dinner. I didn't fancy explaining this one – and I certainly didn't fancy Mother making a Floo call through to see what was wrong, and seeing... well! I knew what the first question would be. _ "Thaklia! How could you let Meck do this?!"_ Let him! Just for once, this was _entirely _ Meck's own fault, consorting with muggles from Merlin knows where – but dinner reminded me. I looked back at the two girls who were staring silently. "Have you two had tea?" Muggles always eat dinner at five o'clock, don't they?

"We – we were waiting for Julie," the one called Sally mumbled awkwardly, still clutching her kneazle.

"She said if the hearing went all right, we'd go to MacDonalds!" Pam piped up. "And have Big Macs and coke and apple pie!"

Have what? I didn't know how they knew the MacDonalds, who are somewhat snobbish relations of the MacMillans, but even more I didn't know how _anyone_ could possibly have thought a Muggle-born Registration Committee hearing could be 'all right.' Even a white mouse. Even a white mouse who'd been dumb enough to fill out those Blood Status forms when you could see you were going to fail – it sounded to me distinctly like the wand fitting going on downstairs was going to need one of those catastrophically stupid joke wands from Weasleys Wizard Wheezes for something that was an appropriate match of ability. We'd had a couple of people like that in during the past year: those dumb enough to firmly believe their wand has gone wrong and needs repairing when it starts honking or turns into a tin parrot, instead of realising it's been switched. If you ask me, they'd merely found a wand that suited them.

"Well- well-" – _if only they'd stop staring at me so intently; even the kneazle was staring _"–well, what about a bite to eat, while we're waiting for your sister and Meck?"

They both nodded silently, and kept staring. I looked about the room rather blankly. It's not the ideal place for entertaining. Because Kentish Town was built by wizards who planned on living over their shops, each building does have a flat above it. But because the current buildings were built by 15th century wizards, their ideas of an adequate flat leave a lot to be desired. I don't mean the plumbing, that's all right. It's the amount of space. Some people have stretched out their building with expansion charms – that's why Buckleton & Prenn's can look such a funny shape sometimes, it means they're using all the magically expanded rooms the Lenoirs have forced into it in order to fit a family of seven. But because _We _moved out generations ago, Number 17 hasn't really been altered much.

We have the shop and the workroom downstairs, and a tiny lean-to off the back that must originally have been meant to be a kitchen, and is now a storeroom for potions ingredients that need it cool and damp – the exotic fungi for anti-chip varnish and so forth. The stairs come up from the door behind the counter, with another door at the top into this big main room. It's sort of furnished as a flat, because the apprentice is meant to live there. Meck doesn't, of course. Mother thinks he wouldn't be safe, and I'm inclined to agree with her on that one, although for entirely different reasons. There's a stove and a pair of cupboards in the corner, because I make our lunch here rather than Flooing home for it, a rather threadbare rug and a collection of slightly battered padded armchairs.

I know it sounds shabby, but we have never done as much business as in the past two years – and we hardly _ever_ have an apprentice who doesn't live at home. Joders apprentice to themselves in Bavaria, and go to exotic places for the foreign training year. Meck will, if he is considered safe to go abroad at all, be sent 'safely' to Bavaria – I am ineffectively opposed to this. If Willem or Schlewing still want the business, I don't see why we're going to give them the opportunity to poison Meck and get it.

But anyway, we did have _some_ food in, if no table – we have a mahogany table for twelve expandable to twenty at home, by the way. Coburg-Drurys are _not_ refugees or philistines. I went over and peered into the cupboard. It would have to be 'high tea' – not that I felt in the least like entertaining. Biscuits, fruit cake, sponge cake, shortbread, scones... I dragged the air-tight charmed tins out of the cupboard. Mother would just have to think Meck had been particularly hungry (he is, of course, _never_ greedy – we just get through a lot of biscuits) and get the house elf to make more. There was even bread – yes, a Coburg loaf – and some cheese and cucumber left over from our lunch to make party-ish sandwiches. I slammed the breadboard and knife down on the tiny work surface, and jabbed my wand to start it cutting.

"I've never seen a chopping board that did that," said a sudden voice behind me. "Julie just chops things by hand, like normal."

The littlest muggle had crept up on me. I did _not_ jump – I'm used to Meck being startling after all. But I did turn round rather sharply. "That _is_ normal," I retorted, gesturing at the now buttering knife. Really, if the white mouse was daft enough to go on doing things the muggle way once she'd left Hogwarts, I didn't see why the government didn't want her around. If their point is that muggle-borns are stupid, she seemed to be a walking verification of it. Of course, their other point is that muggle-borns are violent – witness the Death Eater earlier – and anyone who could meekly allow themselves to be hauled in for questioning, have their wand snapped and be turned over to Dementors without uttering a squeak of protest ... did not really fit that bill. I did _not_ say that to the littlest muggle – I passed her the open biscuit tin. It was always what Meck was after when he used to hang round in the kitchen.

She took one appreciatively. "Julie doesn't have time to bake biscuits – we have packet ones from Tescos." Sally and the kneazle promptly appeared to join in; whoever Tesco are, they don't apparently make Spritz biscuits as nicely as our house elf does. But I didn't quite understand why it was Julie who was substituting for the house-elf.

"What did your parents say when Meck turned up?"

"Oh, they died years ago..." said Pam airily, cramming another biscuit in.

"They died _four_ years ago!" the holder of the kneazle hissed with sudden venom at her little sister. " 'Cause we had to go and live with Aunt Agnes for six months until Julie finished school – that's not _years ago!_ And you shouldn't go round telling people about it!"

_Well, thank you, Sally – _but they weren't paying any attention to me. They glared at each other fiercely over the biscuit tin. Okay, maybe some muggle-borns were violent – I just wished I didn't have to keep coming across them all on the same day. I got a plate out, and stuck it into Sally's just-reaching-into-the-tin free hand. "Put some of those on a plate and put them-" I hovered the tray mid-air with a flick of my wand "-on here." Smart parties may not have chairs, but they are good places for learning the best tray hovering charms. I piled the sandwiches and fruit cake onto the next tray. It was, of course, frightfully inconvenient and annoying, this sudden entertaining – but two gaping muggle-borns were rather satisfactory; slightly more fun than my usual after-closing activity of arguing over the account books and the Death Eater with Meck.

Speak of the Devil – and a mop of angelic curls appears.

"Wand fitting over! Guess!"

I do not guess wands. I had quite enough of that trick at that smart party. So I shrugged. "Well, not your journey piece, thankfully, since you haven't made it yet." Wand makers produce a journey piece wand at the end of their seven years apprenticeship, and the wizard whom it chooses is generally their heir – journey pieces tend not to be tried out for general sale.

Meck ignored my dismissive tone. "Apple, eight inches and unicorn!" he announced, as if we had all expressed the utmost interest.

I glared at him. "Grow up!" Some silly answers are just so _obvious_ – that was Mother's wand combination.

Fortunately, Meck didn't pursue the point. He sidled towards the sandwich plate as if to demonstrate the need for my injunction. "Can I help? I'm starving..."

I whacked the kettle to hurry it up, and then pointed my wand at Meck. "You –" I said fiercely, "deserve to be on bread and water and NO jam for at least a fortnight, so yes, you can get the extra tea cups down from the top cupboard." And I marched past him with the sandwiches.

He did, of course, have to levitate the tea cups down, for the sake of showing off, and then use a scouring charm to get the dust off with various unnecessary little extra flourishes, but I ignored him. I wasn't rising to that sort of bait when we needed to discuss what to do with our unexpected guests. I poured out the last cup of tea. "Right."

"Left," quoth my brother.

I looked pointedly past him to address Julie. "Since your parents are dead–" _she went and looked startled, of course. For Merlin's sake – I mean, it's not like I'd been Interrogating her sisters... _" –that means there's only the three of you that the Ministry will be after. So where are you going to go?"

Meck put his cup down with a very decisive clunk. "Why do they have to 'go' anywhere? They're _here."_

Sometimes there is a very steely tone in Meck's voice – something underlying the awkward and the cheeky and the bloody minded. It isn't Coburg, it's Drury – determined, enduring, Old English Family. It's not usually directed at me.

"If sale of wands to muggle-borns is illegal, I imagine residence in a wand-maker's premises is even more illegal." Witness our lack of house elves – but I hesitated under that steel gaze. "So..."

"Residence anywhere outside of Azkaban is functionally illegal, so unless you want to owl your Death Eater now and tell him I just supplied Julie with a wand, we'll have to settle for illegal," Meck retorted. He looked round at the three Lowes as if that settled the matter and I wasn't present. "You can stay here; there's absolutely nothing to trace you to this address-"

Trace! Trace! I leapt to my feet. Merlin's Beard! "Sally! Have you still got your wand?!"

Meck joined the rest of them in looking as startled as he'd made me feel all afternoon, but that really wasn't helpful now. He was a wand-maker, for Merlin's sake! He should have thought of this!

Sally looked frantically round. "Y-y-yes? Why?"

I stuck my hand out. "You can't keep it. You'll still have the Trace."

Why did they all have to look so blank? That wand was Tracing magic near an under-age witch _right now – _the Control of Under-age Magic committee was probably right now trying to figure out my cooking charms, and all Meck's silly cup hovering, from a well-monitored address that had no legitimate under-age witches at this hour of the day. The risk of _Mother_ in the Floo call suddenly seemed very, very minor.

"Come on," I repeated. "You can't keep it."

"But it's _my _wand. If we can suddenly be attacked by Death Eaters or Dementors, I need to be able to defend myself!"

"At present," I said coldly, "your wand is advertising your position for being attacked by Death Eaters or Dementors, and you are hardly likely to be able to defend yourself against them at your age. And while you're being noble and chivalrous, you might like to consider the rest of your family, or even Meck and I... You Can't Keep That Wand."

_Stupid idiotic Gryffindor..._ I looked crossly at Julie – it was her job not mine to keep her younger siblings in order. I keep Meck in order.

"Sally, you've _got_ to," Julie put in desperately. "They're right – please, Sally – or we'll all be in Azkaban."

She began to shake again, despite Meck's arm around her – which I was ignoring. Sally stared at her, and then very slowly drew her wand and handed it to me. "Where are you going to put it?"

I didn't answer. I shot bluebell flames into the hearth and snapped the wand against the marble mantelpiece. It flared red and gold as it burned.

"Right." I looked up at the clock as the fire died out, and then back at three rather hostile pairs of dark eyes. The high tea seemed to have petered out with the flames. "If you're staying here for the time being," I emphasised the last three words slightly, and shot a glare at Meck, who was looking determinedly away from me and at Sally, "then at quarter to six we need to get things sorted for overnight, before Meck and I have to go home." I knew the answer, but I asked the question anyway. "Did you bring _anything_ with you?"

Only the kneazle. And we don't have pets. The last animals we had were the labraderiar and the budgidor, and we gave the labraderiar away – I suppose we technically gave the budgidor away too, since the labraderiar had eaten him – because we just don't have pets.

Given the already mutinous expression on Sally's face, I decided now was not the time to address that point. "Let's see what we can find then. And _you – " _I fixed Meck with another glare "– can wash up!"

The other room off this main living room is a store room, crammed with boxes and storage trunks and big bundles of wand wood. It probably has a few more cobwebs than the shop downstairs, because I am not a house-elf, but when you have squeezed past these, in the corner is a steep, narrow, open-tread staircase. This goes up into a long, narrow room, the size of the entire building footprint without the expanding charms we have downstairs. It is stuffed with – junk.

Here liveth the old furniture and all other bulky clutter of Merlin knows how many generations of Coburg-Drurys: worn out work-benches, a broken iron bedstead, three different shop counters, and any number of broken straight back chairs. A lot of the stuff is the result of bowtruckle damage: they tend to get brought in inside bundles of wand wood, and you don't notice them until they've got out and clawed vast holes in things, or eaten the shelves – our current teak counter in the shop was changed just after I started working here, when no less than four bowtruckles ran amok.

The white mouse following me stopped abruptly. "We- we have to sort all – all this lot out...?" She clutched the back of a three-legged armchair weakly.

_For Merlin's sake...!_

"It looks like the top of the house, doesn't it?" I returned coldly. There was _no need_ to imply that I would need help to ever sort all this junk out! As manager, I really _am_ going to dispose of the stuff one day; it just gets brought up here until I have the time to do so. That was even less likely to materialise now I had three muggle-borns on my hands – but we weren't up here to discuss _my_ family's junk. "Doesn't it?" I repeated, pushing past the iron bedstead towards a rickety looking old wardrobe.

"Yes," said the white mouse meekly.

"Isn't it?" said Pam.

_There's too little spunk and then there's taking other people's punch lines... _but I opened the wardrobe door with all the dramatic poise I could: "It isn't!"

The very sulky owner of the kneazle grunted, but the other two girls pushed through the junk to look. The wardrobe houses a tiny spiral staircase, a miniature compared to the one which goes up to the Headmaster's office at Hogwarts, but still a fairly impressive piece of magic.

(I know about the Headmaster's staircase, just by the way, because I got sent there to confirm my permission from Slughorn to go home and meet Meck. _Not_ because I was bad.)

At the top of the spiral – is the top of the house: a long loft room with no walls, only the sloping roof meeting in a point overhead. You can stand up comfortably in the middle strip, about six foot wide; after that you have to do what my silly little brother still calls 'Duck or Grouse.' A round porthole window at either end let in enough light to show that this room is not cluttered: exactly two iron bedsteads, a wash stand, and a big cedar trunk with a deeply embossed 'D' on its lid – you may infer its age from this.

"I thought," I said, with a threadbare attempt at a cheering smile after this bloody awful day, "that this might be a bit more comfortable than Azkaban."

They said nothing, but we really didn't have time to ponder the matter. I bent down and opened the trunk. Coburg-Drurys may not expansion-charm their houses until they bulge, but the Drurys had a penchant for expanding the furniture. Like the staircase wardrobe, our dining table at home – and this trunk. A household's worth of linen lives in it – the generations of anti-shatter charms on the windows downstairs have been matched by generations of preserving charms upstairs, and I hauled the Georgian era stuff out scarcely worn. That may, of course, also be because the trunk has a family sensitive biting charm on the lid – well, make that family hyper-sensitive. It is a Drury trunk – it bites Coburgs. Even Meck, who tends to charm anything he comes across. I, taking after the Drurys, am probably the first person in the family to be able to lean into the wretched thing for about a century.

I leaned in. _Two feather beds_ … "two of you will have to share" … _two sets of woollen pillows, two sets of blankets_ … I plonked these in Julie's arms to start making beds … _towels, flannels, and the charm-chilled pitcher for the washstand _… I sent Pam downstairs to get the water … _one baby blanket_ … my concession for a kneazle bed, if Sally _ever_ planned on putting the dratted creature down … _a pair of rather thin muslin curtains for the windows up here_ … the last thing we needed was the Van Dykes peering in from their attic. I scrambled up and fired one-way blackout charms at both windows – we used to use those in the shop before the government insisted on shutters, so I'm fairly good at them – sent Sally to tell Meck to draw the curtains in the kitchen – removed the feather bed from Julie and did it properly myself – ordered Pam downstairs to find a relatively whole straight chair – it's what Meck derisively calls "Thaklia's Windmill Mode" – but sometimes it is necessary to wave your arms as well as your wand in order to get things done. And they needed to be – five past Six.

I seized another pillow. "With the blackout charms you can have the lamp on up here, but don't try and take them down in the morning – I'll do it. The shop will be locked up, and the stairs down, but you'll have to make sure all the other doors are firmly shut – and _don't_ leave that kneazle wandering about: it's got to be up here too. The wardrobe stairs can be locked from the inside – there's a bolt to put across, but you'll have to be up in the morning to open that before we get here, 'cause it can't be done from the outside. If you hear noises in the night, don't investigate. Stay Put – there shouldn't be anybody, and they won't suspect the wardrobe if it doesn't make a noise. Somebody could smash through the charms on it – but you couldn't do much against them if they did that, anyway. You'll probably hear a great rumpus in the early hours, but that's only the patrons from the nightclub in the "Four Slugs" basement – they tend to come out living up to its name of _'Legless.'_"

The white mouse had merely nodded under my barrage of directions up until this point, but now she gave me a very slight, shy smile. "I remember."

"_You _remember?"

"Y-yes. That was where I first met Meck."

I gaped. _Meck … and the white mouse … and __'Legless'__...!_

'_**Legless'!**_

"Ah- er-" I went for the simplest question. "_You?_"

_I would go into where Coburg-Drurys did and did not go to with somebody else later..._

"Yes." Julie shuffled awkwardly. "It was a bit loud, really. I wasn't having much fun, and I was just sort of standing at the edge and – Meck was there too, and we got to chatting that it was noisy and dull, and I said I wished I'd brought a book, and – we just, well–" She seemed to remember she was talking to Meck's big sister, and blushed slightly. "I had only gone because the girls I worked with at the Ministry asked everybody. It- it was a sort of office night out." She shrugged apologetically. "Hufflepuffs do tend to go round in groups, you know."

"Why? So they don't get attacked by nasty Slytherins?"

I had not realised the smallest Lowe was sitting on the stairs.

"You will have," I said to the white mouse with sudden and perfect calm, "to make do with the left-overs from the high tea for supper, but we will try and get here with things in time for breakfast. And Meck and I have to go now." _Yes, we had to go now – five more minutes in the company of this bunch, and I was going to have died of shock._ "I'm sorry there's no milk for the kneazle."

"She doesn't drink milk," said the kneazle's owner sulkily from further down the stairs. "She'd get fat."

_Just what did she think the Hogwarts house-elves gave the kneazles during term...? _But then, I supposed the Lowes were quite capable of having acquired a kneazle with an identity problem that thought it was a knarl...

"Meck says he's waiting for you," Sally added.

I really didn't want to think exactly what Meck had been doing recently, that the two younger Lowes were so comfortable around him in a way they certainly weren't with me – Slytherins do not get sentimental or suddenly feel old. I marched downstairs. Through the junk room – _that would need rearranging so there wasn't an obvious route through it – _down into the living room, took the proffered can of Floo powder off Meck with a silent glare, and left.

Left my family's shop, _my_ shop, the only shop in Kentish Town still run by its original family, the _raison d'existence _for a Coburg-Drury and the front line against eliminating Undesirables – in the care of three particularly muggle-born witches, only one in possession of a wand.

But I didn't have time to fret, for the flickering fireplaces in the Floo were slowing, slowing, flaring green... and I was stepping out onto our hallway hearth at home; and the house-elf, clothes brush at the ready, was bowing and brushing off the soot and straightening my robes. "Mistress has been very worried about Miss Thaklia and Master Mecklenberg," he squeaked. "Dinner has been ready over half an hour–"

House-elves never criticise, of course – they just find other ways round to say it. Unlike Mother, who fluttered out of the parlour at that moment to cry: "Thaklia! Whatever has been happening?!"

For one mad nano-second, I wondered exactly where I would begin if I was to answer that question accurately. Then I realised I didn't have a more reasonable explanation. We are Never this late home.

"We- we're a- a little late," I fumbled. "Er-er-"

The hearth flared green behind me. Mother's priorities instantly changed: "Meck! Are you all right?!"

My wretchedly charming little brother kissed her affectionately. "I'm starving!" he announced – as if he hadn't already pigged it on high tea. "We're late," he added, "because when we were totting up the books, we found three extra galleons – it took us some time to figure out who must have overpaid."

Okay – so some people can make marvellous explanations at a moments notice – but guess who's responsible for taking and recording the money...

Mother looked at me reproachfully. Meck breezed off upstairs. I wrenched my skirts away from the house-elf, who was busy fussing quietly about the amount of cobwebs I'd got up them, and looked right back. I may be the shopkeeper and I may be the book-keeper, but in reality or allegory, I just _wasn't_ going to take the blame for this one.

"It was the one transaction Meck was responsible for dealing with," I snapped. "If dinner's waiting, I'll go and change quickly."

"Meck!" I collared him on the landing. "They Can't Stay There – _We Can't Do This,_" I hissed, as he resisted my efforts to drag him into a more discrete spare bedroom.

My annoying little brother stared right back. "Why not?"

_Why not? Why not! _A wand shop up a dead-end magical alley and endless government regulations and a probable Death Eater calling at least twice a week and a host of nosy neighbours and our parents to consider and our father in his nineties and Meck's studies-

I distilled all these reasons into one: "It's impossible!"

Meck looked at me coldly. "You're the one who's supposed to be a cunning Slytherin."

Yes, cunning – a cunning which is usually applied to the issue of self-preservation... an issue which always and unavoidably reminded me that if it wasn't for Meck, I would currently be Mrs Willem or Schlewing Joder, dutifully producing heirs for the business and enduring the Bismark-moustachioed inanities.

A fact which Meck knows.

"Oh, very well," I snapped. "Have your own way." He turned. "And on your own head be it!" I yelled after him up the stairs.


	3. Blood Traitor

_A/N: After a Very long wait, a Very long chapter... Enjoy!_

Chapter 3. Blood Traitor

Of course, things never land on Meck's head. The Fates apparently look down on the innocent mop of blonde curls and think he's too young for such responsibility.

My mousy-brown apparently invites responsibility. Ton-loads of it, which arrived when I opened my eyes the next morning to consider the fact that we had not one, not even two, but _three_ illegal muggle-born witches hiding in premises which were getting at least twice weekly visits from a nosy Death Eater. And their Kneazle. All of whom, kneazle included, needed feeding, watering, concealing, clothing and entertaining – without anybody, from my parents to our neighbouring shopkeepers and especially Mr Coultt and even more especially the Death Eater, noticing.

I groaned and sat up in bed – to reduce the area the Fates had to aim at. Perhaps being Mrs Willem or Schlewing Joder might have been easier – at any rate the sons-and-heirs would have had an acceptable blood status.

With which conclusion I padded downstairs before Mother was up to notice and stuck a bottle of charm-chilled milk in my coat pocket towards the girls' breakfasts – the kneazle would just have to think she was a knarl and I was poisoning her. I just jolly well might. I don't like kneazles.

Of course, though Mother wasn't up to notice, the house-elf was: "Has you run out of milk at the shop, Miss Thaklia?"

House-elves don't like the fact that they can't follow us to Kentish Town, and make up for it by trying to keep as much track as possible of what we're doing there. But I really didn't need a nosy house-elf just at present. "Meck drank it all," I snapped shortly. "When we were dealing with – the accounts – that made us late for dinner yesterday. And he's finished the bread. I need a new loaf, pronto. And don't tell Mother."

No matter how you speak to a house-elf, it bows and squeaks and scuttles off – exactly as the white mouse did an hour later when I stepped out of the Floo.

"It could have been _anybody!_" I snapped.

"Well, hello anyway," said the smallest Lowe from the doorway.

I didn't need – I really _didn't _need – another day like yesterday. I ignored both of them, and marched over to the kitchen to unpack my coat pocket. "Milk. Bread. Marmalade. I hope you're not a porridge-eating clan." The Floo was hissing again for Meck coming through. I unlocked the stairway door and went promptly down. I knew perfectly well what she'd been hanging about in front of the hearth for – and I didn't want to see it. It was all very well for Meck – he wasn't going to be the one with three muggle-borns underfoot all day – and he wouldn't particularly mind that either...

My shop was dim in the faint light that came through the shutters; peacefully dim and calm and beeswax polished, with – if you had the stair door shut – no reminders of current _difficulties._ Except, once I'd hovered the shutters down, the Blood Status book. And in that...

I hoped it had happened on the way home – in whatever this 'rush hour' is that muggles have. So that whoever waited at home would only have to be told it was a car crash – the standard muggle excuse.

I knew that wouldn't happen once _they_ had an address.

I picked the book up and banged it under the counter. I could get it out when customers came in. The Death Eater shouldn't be due today – 31st of August – unless it was thought necessary to tell me about– He'd come tomorrow, to check our full Hogwarts wand sales. We were going to need to get some things sorted before then...

Between eight customers on one hour spacing charms with acceptable Blood Status, I sorted. And managed to catch Meck both times he tried to sidle upstairs. I did have three assistants to help with lunch – I don't think it speeded matters, and crumbs and butter have never been spread so far across our floor.

At five o'clock I sent them all – kneazle included – down to look at the workshop with Meck. I needed peace to check all this lot:

There was a piece of old carpet to muffle footsteps on the living room floor. A sound-muffling charm would have done better, but I have hardly had any call to practice them since Hogwarts, and the few Meck has done in the past have usually failed dramatically, and started broadcasting loudly like a _Sonorous_ charm instead.

There were one way _Obscuro _charms on all the windows – I just hoped Martjee Van Dyke did not make peering into our upstairs windows from hers enough of a habit to notice she now couldn't.

There was a more circuitous route arranged across the store room to the open stairs, and the junk room had been rearranged to have a long V-shaped path through it to the wardrobe, with a large armchair suspended by a semi-permanent hanging charm – the sort you use for holding lamps up – at the point of the 'V'. That was Pam's idea. If they had to go to the attic, Julie could release the charm, and then nobody could get to the wardrobe. Possibly. If she remembered and hadn't completely lost her head when the alarm went off.

For I had, in the face of my little brother's scepticism, produced a no-risk-of-back-firing alarm: the protean-charmed second door bell which used to hang in the workshop when Father ran the place by himself, to provide early warning of customers. Meck never noticed it going off anyway, so he wasn't going to miss it, whatever he said. If anybody asked, I hadn't wanted Undesirables coming in without warning while I was upstairs, had I? _That was even true, depending on how you defined Undesirable... _ I hung it carefully by the door between the living room and store room, so it would be audible further upstairs too.

"When that goes off," I said fiercely, "there has to be _Perfect_ silence. Unless you're tired of living, of course."

Of course, none of these were any good against _hom__e__num reveli__o_ or anything like that – but nobody should be checking if we didn't excite any suspicion. And for that, all I could do was wait. Wait: all through dinner; and all night; and all the next morning sitting behind the shop counter updating our wand inventory to show that we had sold wands to every eleven-year-old entitled to go to Hogwarts that year and had certainly _n__ot_ sold an eight-inch apple wood wand with unicorn core to a muggle-born – _you can hardly have sold something if they haven't paid for it and it hasn't left the premises._

Wait, wait, wait, for the Death Eater to come.

I didn't dare shut the stairway door behind me, because I usually have it ajar. And nothing, _nothing,_ must look any different from the Death Eater's point of view – except the new sign on the door.

He was halfway through the door before he noticed it, and stopped abruptly to peer, holding the door at arm's length as if the very word was contaminating:

**Mud Bloods will NOT be served**

"I didn't want another batch of abusive Undesirables coming in again, especially if I was here by myself." I explained briskly. "Is that all right?"

He grunted in what might have been a non-committal fashion. "Could arrange security trolls. If you're worried."

_Thank you very much – but __I wasn't worried in a way that security trolls would help._

"Control of Wand Use Regulations forbid the presence of non-wand-bearers in a wand-makers shop," I repeated automatically – which made him scowl in an even more troll-like fashion. "Fortunately," I added with my best appeasing smile, "we only had people with _pure_ Blood Status yesterday. I opened the book, and slid it across the counter to him. If you care about having a wizarding world with a pure Blood Status – as opposed to just wanting an opportunity to be nasty to those without – the last day of August's sales should have been pleasing.

He glanced down at them, and then up again. "So who's this, then?"

My heart seemed to stop. My face probably went white, and very, very slowly, or so it seemed, I turned to see.

But the doorway was empty. And I realised he was looking at the end of the counter. At the floor. At That Kneazle.

"Oh! That– that's Fi– er– Fiorhana," I gasped out, wishing more than ever that Julie Lowe had had the barest smidgen of common sense to stop her little sister naming her kneazle Fifi. "We've, er – acquired her."

I didn't dare to look at him – I'd never heard anything more suspicious in my life than my stupid gasps – and so I did what I'd never dreamt of doing: I bent down and scooped up that wretched kneazle, fussed it, tickled it, _cuddled_ it, and swung round to look the Death Eater in the eye with a beaming smile. "She'd just been hanging around for a couple of weeks, mewing and wailing and in quite a bad state. We think she must have been abandoned by some – mudblood" – _there, at least I'd got the word in – _"who was trying to cover their tracks."

He scowled, and I shrugged. "I don't like kneazles terribly," I prattled on gaily, "but I couldn't leave the poor thing out in the cold, and – she's rather sweet. She's Fiorhana – she was a witch queen in one of the Icelandic sagas who set out to find new lands, it seemed appropriate..."

Keep talking long enough and you can divert practically anybody – You-Know-Who and Bellatrix Lestrange and Antonin Dolohov and Yaxley and Selwyn and okay, everybody currently 'in government' probably excepted. But this time, it had worked. The scowl lifted: "Do you read the old Icelandic Sagas?"

Merlin – by the time I started knowing what Death Eaters read for amusement I was definitely a collaborator. But I have read them – I used to read them when Meck was doing maths problems because you can stop easily between verses. And so I nodded – "I love them!" – and standing in our wand shop, with three illegal muggle-born witches holding their breaths upstairs, clutching one of said illegal muggle-born witches' Kneazle called Fifi in my arms, I discussed Iceland literature with a Death Eater...

When he had gone, I went upstairs. "That Kneazle Has To Go."

They were all still looking rather shocked from the Death Eater's visit, but Pam spoke up. "She can't go..."

"She has to," I snapped. This was no time for feeble sentiment and 'she's all I have' and-

"She can't," Pam repeated. "'Cause if you've just told a Death Eater you've adopted a kneazle, it'll look a bit suspicious if she's not around next time."

Great. I'd just talked myself into a kneazle.

I'd talked myself into more trouble than just a kneazle – namely, a visit from Martjee Van Dyke that afternoon. Meck has always referred to her as 'the old coot.' I've always told him that's impolite – unfortunately, it is also a fairly accurate description that tends to spring to mind whenever you see her. Madam Van Dyke is short and decidedly plump, and always wears funny little short black robes that show skinny ankles in yellowed-with-age white stockings. She has a little white knob of hair on top, little beady eyes in a little pointy face, and a way of poking about with little penetrating glances wherever she goes.

While Stradivaria Corbellini comes in here occasionally to be friendly, in a big, jolly Italian way; the old coot only comes in when she wants something. And grist for her gossip mill.

Today's excuse was – milk. She had just started cooking something or other – I didn't catch what: people joke that German recipes sound like two cats fighting, but I never find Flemish any clearer – when she had found that all her milk was 'off.' And she needed two pints... Did I…? Could I…?

"The charm's _'Refrigidus,' _I said at an appropriate temperature. "But I'm afraid we're entirely out." We were. Three Lowes consume a lot of milk for breakfast – the one bottle a day I had brought wasn't going far enough.

"Oh..." The old coot sighed dramatically, and put her head on one side. "But of course... I hear you've adopted a kneazle, now..."

That Kneazle. Had been on our premises not quite forty-eight hours. Had been upstairs. Had been seen only by myself and Meck and the girls and –

_We've a mutual acquaintance at the Ministry, then, Martjee?_

"Yes... adopted us," I agreed airily.

She put her head to the other side. "I hadn't _noticed_ a kneazle hanging about..."

_You tale-bearing, betraying, interfering old __**Hexe**__!_

I Looked at her. "I hadn't noticed you hanging about in Kingston, either. She's been round our house there for several weeks, but you know how house-elves are with pets..." _(She doesn't – the Van Dykes are too poor to have one) _"...so I brought her here. She's surprisingly pleasant company, but she does drink a lot of milk." I smiled condescendingly – _you needn't think I'm going to invite you in to meet her – _ and stepped round the end of the counter. "I'm sorry not to have able to help, Madam Van Dyke. I'd better not keep you any longer, or your cooking will be spoiled."

She took my hint when I opened the door. "And Madam Nydowski might have milk!" I added as I shut it – 'Collie & Grout' and 'The Four Slugs' have a thirty-year Grand Feud running over a second-hand recipe book that was apparently either hexed (Nydowski) or never paid for (Van Dyke).

I wasn't the only person who'd noticed our mutual acquaintance. The next morning the front windows of both Number 16 and Number 17 were daubed with crude letters in what looked nastily like blood:

COLLABORATOR.

Taking the shutters down from the inside, it took me a moment to realise exactly what the mess on the window was –_ and then what it said! And the grotesque faux reflection on the Van Dykes' window – ! _My bellow of sheer rage brought Meck and the two younger Lowes flying downstairs to see what had happened.

_Meck and the –!_ I registered, and let out another bellow: "Upstairs! Go back upstairs AT ONCE! Up! Now! The shutters are open, for Merlin's sake! NOW!"

All three of them fled – thanks a bunch, little brother – and I flung the front door open to get this outrageous stuff off the window. But a window cleaning charm didn't work.

It took me an _hour_. A whole hour of experimenting, to the point where I was about to Floo home and get the house-elf (scrubbing the outside of the windows couldn't _possibly_ count as being in a wand-makers – surely?) before I found that a heavy-duty scouring charm, applied slowly and repeatedly, got it off. The Van Dykes either hadn't noticed their window – it _is_ completely obscured from the inside of their shop by towering stacks of books, and they don't have the government making them take shutters down – or didn't like to come out while I was there.

I _wasn't_ going to go and tell them. But I fancied going to give Somebody Else a piece of my mind – or wand, I wasn't fussed which. I knew who'd used _that_ expression – in My hearing! A certain wretched little whinging _Schnieder!_ The only problem was that I had no way of telling which one of them. There are five Lenoir girls, somewhere between Meck and I in age – _they _have no son-and-heir – but I can never tell the difference between them. Meck refers to them asUn, Deux, Trois, Cat, Sank – after some muggle joke, because the fourth one's Catherine – but after this that seemed entirely Too Polite!

I did not slam the front door – it just shut with a rather loud noise that echoed because Kentish Town is practically silent in September – and I certainly did not need to go upstairs for a cup of coffee after that ordeal and find Sally and Pam in fits of almost hysterical muffled giggles.

"C-c-c-oll-lab-b-b-orat-or-r...!" Sally gasped, rocking to and fro on the sofa.

"It's Not Funny!" I snapped, whacking the kettle with my wand with such force that it belched forth clouds of boiling steam instantly. "Not At All Funny!"

The Gryffindor merely let out another muffled whoop of laughter, but the littlest muggle saw fit to contradict. "It is!" she protested with a momentarily straight face that twitched with ill-suppressed laughter, " 'cause – 'cause it doesn't say who you're collaborating with...!" And they both collapsed into more amusement.

"What?"

Perhaps I looked threatening brandishing the kettle in one hand and the coffee pot in the other – at any rate, they both promptly fled into the back room and up the stairs, still in fits of giggles. I put the kettle down very precisely. Meck had – typically – removed himself to the workshop, but the White Mouse was still here. She looked decidedly as if she might just have been laughing – she looked at me in trepidation now.

"That," I said coldly, pointing at the door her two sisters had vanished through, "Is Not Funny."

"Yes," said the white mouse meekly.

"And even less funny is that they Came Downstairs."

"Yes"

"In Opening Hours, where Anybody could have seen them."

"Yes."

"When Martjee Van Dyke is a _spy_ for the Death Eaters."

"Yes."

"And spends her days peering in here, especially at present."

"Yes."

"They must _never_ come in the shop again."

"Yes."

"And you should have stopped them."

"Yes."

_If only she'd stop saying 'yes' so bloody meekly! __And – yes_ – _now she was going to cry!_

"'Yes' is all very well," I said flatly, turning away to get the biscuit tin out of the cupboard. "It depends whether you want to go to Azkaban or not."

"I- I'm sorry..." the white mouse whimpered, "...th-that they were laughing, and they came downstairs, b-but – they're bored, Th-Thaklia... Normally they'd be at school... they've nothing to do..."

_Nothing except listening for biscuit tins opening! _

I slammed one biscuit apiece onto a plate, and took a second one myself straight out of the tin before putting it firmly away. _Muggles...? More like Locusts!_

"So you're bored, are you?" I demanded, pushing the plate across the work surface.

"Yes," said Sally sulkily. "No books and no wand and not even any paper or pencils... there's nothing particular to do at all..."

_N__othing particular to do at all... __Quite apart from the issue of whether they provided better amusement for ungrateful Gryffindors in Azkaban, I was fairly sure I had once found a solution for having nothing particular to do – __of course, __Slytherins __**are**__ much more ingenious than Hufflepuffs and Gryffindors._

_Which solution was, of course... entirely relevant now. _

"You could get on with some lessons."

"Study out of school?"

"Learn magic without going to Hogwarts?

One sounded sceptical; the other enthusiastic. The white mouse was staring at me in a strange fashion. "How?" she said blankly.

"Like Meck did, Julie!" Pam retorted eagerly.

_Okay, I really, seriously, __truly, __frankly, quite desperately Did Not Want To Know how much time my wretched little brother had been spending with these Lowes lately..._

So I glared at the white mouse _– this was all, after all, her fault – _and put my coffee cup down firmly. "Well, since you're highly illegal existing and more highly illegal existing here, you two might as well crown it as a pair of gallant Gryffindors and put one hex over the government by learning magic."_ If they were going to be underfoot all day, they might as well do something useful._

"So can we start now? And what do we begin with?" The one enthusiastic party bounced off her chair to swing on the edge of the work surface I was leaning on. "What?"

"History of magic," said the Kneazle's owner sarcastically. "It's Really boring..."

_And somebody round here had been complaining __that school was more__ amus__ing__... __but what did one 'begin with'? _I stared at the littlest muggle. Meck began his studies of magic with an impromptu lesson in silencing charms, because one of the portraits in the school room had so much good advice to offer I was obliged to use drastic measures, and we just sort of went from there – but that's probably why we ended up with the labraderiar...

"She's right," said Julie suddenly. "You do start with History of Magic; everybody does – with the Sorting, but– er, but," – she got flustered under my gaze – "Pam, er – can't."

Pam couldn't have her own sorting song – so she got three, instead. Sally _sang_ hers,_ sotto voce_; while Julie and I demurred on the grounds that we couldn't remember the tune the Hat had used, and wrote ours down on a couple of loose sheets of paper torn out of the back of the Blood Status book, while ignoring Meck's unhelpful suggestions of other rhymes.

_Parchment... I'd need to bring some proper parchment, and some quills and ink and all Meck's old school books that I could find, first and fourth year... __Of course, it was a right Pain, and I was Never going to get a chance to sort out that junk room now... but if we rearranged and cleared a couple of the old work-benches they'd make passable desks..._

~:~

It seemed to be my fate at present to go rummaging about in old storage trunks in attics. With impertinent little creatures following me and asking questions.

"What is you looking for in there, Miss Thaklia?"

I slammed the lid of this particular trunk down to look over it at our house-elf. Who was standing almost on tip-toe, presumably from an effort to see what I was up to behind the lid.

_What was I up to? Why on earth should I be up in our attic, after dinner, looking through the chest that had all Meck's old school books packed up in it?_

"I am, er..."

There's 'Mind your own business and don't tell Mother' – but a secret isn't really a secret if the house-elf knows it – and I wasn't too sure where the current government stood on wringing information out of magical creatures. "I'm hiding something," I said firmly. "From Mother. It's her birthday in November, so she mustn't look in here – and you mustn't either."

The wretched creature bowed. "And what is I to tell Mistress if she tells me to clean in there?"

Never does a house-elf let the issue drop!

"That Thaklia told you not to!" I snapped. "Now get out of here! And don't peep through the keyhole!" You have to cover every option with a house-elf – they don't tell you that in Bathilda Bagshot's _History of Magic. _I flicked the trunk open again, and added that particular tome to the stack in the undetectable extensor-charmed shopping basket beside me. Charms, Transfiguration, Herbology, Potions – though I had no idea at all how we were going to do that one safely. Meck was bad enough, but Gryffindors in my experience are always explosively hopeless at Potions...

It was a very heavy basket by the time I was done, the sort of weight when you really actually want a house-elf to carry it for you. All those books, and some of my old robes, because the Lowes really couldn't be expected to go on wearing what they'd arrived in much longer, and a large tome of Icelandic Sagas – just in case.

Meck found me in the reading-room the next morning, getting that one out. He smirked. "A present? Or to hit him on the head with it?"

Probably because I have tried so many times, my wretched little brother is pretty good at dodging. And then fleeing partway upstairs to hang over the bannisters and snigger irritatingly.

I was not going to rise to such juvenile behaviour. I rescued my Sagas from the floor, and lugged the whole basket out to the hall to put my cloak on.

"Do you _need_ to go so early...?"

_I wished people would stop speaking from behind me!_ I don't jump – having a little brother like Meck really ought to leave one completely unstartle-able – but yet again I was turning rather sharply, this time to face Mother.

"It's eight o'clock, Mother."

"But you keep going in so early..."

_Yes, Mother – I've got three muggle-borns who need their breakfast...!_

"...and Meck, too."

I thought that was where we were heading: Mother has always feared Meck is over-doing it if he leaves the house before eleven o'clock. I picked up the basket, and took the Floo powder can off the mantelpiece.

"I _am_ manager, Mother," I protested coldly. "To get the shop open, I have to get there a _little_ before opening time. And Meck's meant to be there _Studying_!" – the last comment added in the direction of the stairs. I flung the powder into the hearth, tucked the basket under my cloak before I strewed books through the entire Floo network, and –

"And there's this Ministry official who keeps calling!" Meck's voice suddenly echoed back downstairs. "Thaklia looks in the mirror every time before she answers _his_ ring..."

The flames shot up green. "I do not!" I yelled back, mid-turn. "Number 17, Kentish Town!"

_Vielen d__ank, little brother__... __I don't think._

If it is possible to feel grateful towards a Death Eater, for the next week I was. Because he didn't come in – while I fielded Meck's sniggering at one place and Mother's persistent questions at the other:

When had I met him? _The day he'd told me I was legally compelled to spy on our customers..._

What was his name? _I'd no idea – I'd thought he was a Healer and he'd never bothered to re-introduce himself since... _

How long had he been friendly? _Since two days after Meck brought his girlfriend and little sisters to hide in our shop..._

What did he do? _Murder people, mostly..._

The only place to get away from it was with the Lowes. While they might be careless about coming downstairs, and laugh over the Van Dykes – they knew Death Eaters weren't to be joked about. I didn't know if Sally and Pam were actually scared of the Death Eater _per se _ – but they were scared of how scared Julie was. White mice who dump themselves on you unexpectedly out of the Floo are a pain – but nobody should turn that shade of grey. I brought her half a bottle of Bobbin's patent calming draught we had left over in the bathroom cupboard at home, and we took our minds off it with Learning Magic – capitalisation Pam's.

It was, of course, as illegal as existing. But it is harder to worry about being illegal when you are explaining the seven uses of dragon's blood, or hoping somebody's wand flick is not going to emulate the wizard Baruffio.

I handed Sally's education over to Julie. She needed something to take her mind off, well, everything; and it was far more recently that she had been studying that stage – and I didn't fancy getting another fourteen year old to produce another labraderiar. The white mouse, of course, squeaked when I told her. "But – but I don't know how to _teach..."_

_And I suppose I was born knowing? _ I looked at her coldly. "Then you'd better start learning. Give her the books to read – that's always a good place to start."

Having the books to read worked fairly nicely with Pam. She vanished into them with delight, leaving me in peace to read Icelandic Sagas – or at least in what peace there was while Julie and Sally struggled over Summoning charms. Apart from that, it was like teaching Meck again – including the sudden, startling and totally unrelated questions. She saved them up, too: "How do you bleed a dragon?" – in the middle of Charms; "What did Baruffio _do_ with his buffalo?" – during transfiguration; and, presumably saved specially to commemorate having been with us for five weeks:

"What does 'evidge verdam-thingy' mean?"

_Is one strictly guilty of corrupting an eleven year old if she's already highly illegal, and on a wanted list?_ I looked at Pam with dignity. "Something that should only be said under the levels of provocation a little brother sixteen years younger than yourself can produce."

Sally looked up. "Do they get _more_ annoying with a greater age gap?" She obviously found three years one way and four the other quite trying enough.

"Yes," I said with feeling.

"Oh..." Sally studied Pam thoughtfully. "Ye gods and little fishes," she remarked with self-conscious nonchalance, and went back to her book.

The white mouse was Looking at me. I didn't look at her. I knew, because Meck had been good enough to tell me, that she was worried about my choice of language round her little sisters: "She thinks you're corrupting them – like with me." Of course, I had come in yesterday to hear great hilarity in the junk room over one of those stupid muggle Knot-Knot jokes. This one went:

"Snark snark."

"Who's there?"

"Sssssss..."

"'Ssss...' who?"

"No! Not an Indian, it's a _Slytherin!"_

_And I was corrupting people?_

But I knew _Ewige verdamnis _was my fault. So are the Knot-knot jokes round here – because I once took Meck into a muggle bookshop when he was about eight, because we were walking along Tottenham Court road to the Leaky Cauldron and it was raining _really_ heavily, and I was daft enough to buy him the joke book he fell in love with while we were sheltering in there. I have, believe me, more than lived to regret it – it looked like I was going to live to regret German expletives as well.

Right now I felt more like using one. I Did Not need Looking at. So I yanked _History of Magic _out of the basket we were keeping everything packed in in the junk room schoolroom, slammed it down at the next chapter, and got up. "Read that. I – have to go shopping."

'Shopping' was a new element in this ridiculous, precarious existence I had been landed with. Three illegal muggle-born witches eat a lot. And the amount of food I could bring from home was now limited: the house-elf had told Mother about all the milk Meck had apparently started drinking. He had then been subjected to several days' anxious maternal enquiry as to the state of his health and waterworks. While this did make dinner in Kingston entertaining in a way – and added a certain spice to life when I reported it to three other people (_serve him right for his comments about the 'Ministry Official'_) – I didn't want news of our suddenly increased consumption of food and drink at the shop to reach a Ministry-controlled St. Mungo's. I couldn't go to the grocers here in the Court, I'd end up meeting our house-elf if I went to anywhere on Diagon Alley, and I was pretending I hadn't even heard Meck's suggestion about some place on Knockturn Alley. Knockturn Alley makes even 'Legless' pale into insignificance as a place to which Coburg-Drurys Do Not Go. All that left was muggle shops – so I asked the White Mouse. Who, of course, looked at me in her usual blank fashion and said she didn't know where I should go, she didn't know this part of London at all.

It was Pam who said that there were always 'Stations' everywhere. 'Stations' for shopping sounded a pretty good idea – I knew about stations. There was the one at Hogsmeade, and the one at Kings Cross – Kings Cross was even one that had muggles in it.

These stations were a bit different. I knew, because Pam had explained, that they were stations for muggle cars, not trains, but that didn't make sense of how they seemed to work. A muggle drives into the station in their car, gets out and goes round to the back to hitch it up to one of the big humming machines with a sort of rubber hose. After some messing with that, the muggle goes into the attached ticket office, hands over some of their strange muggle money in exchange for a very flimsy paper ticket which they frequently drop on their way out of the ticket office – _and then gets back into the same car..._

I mean, that's like getting out halfway to Hogwarts just for the sake of getting back on again.

Anyway, whatever the idiosyncrasies of muggle travel networks, that made you fully appreciate a Floo connection, these stations were at least quite common. I was getting quite good at finding them: they tend to occur on corners, and be painted nice bright colours with names like "Esso" and "Texaco." I had so far found eleven different ones, within walking or very short apparition hop, enough not to have to go back to any particular one. And, just as Pam had said, their ticket offices did sell food. Of a sort. Most of it was unrecognisable, and I got some funny looks when I had to ask. Take bread, for example. Muggle bread comes wrapped in plastic bags, so you can't tell what it is that you're buying. I suppose this shouldn't have been surprising, because when you do unwrap it, it turns out to have been somehow baked in individual slices of a soft, fluffy stuff that our house-elf wouldn't dream of using to mop the floor with, let alone serve up for eating. No witch would waste her money on it if she knew what it was beforehand. The Lowes, of course, all greeted it like a long-lost friend by the name of "Hovis." Stations didn't take normal money, either – wanting the stuff muggles use instead. Meck had some way of changing Sickles to it. I just_ wasn't_ asking how.

Just don't ask but carry on with it. That about summed up my entire life at present. And meant I had to go shopping now. I straightened my 'Mudbloods' sign and straightened my hat and stepped firmly out of our shop. There was no reason why I should not go out in the afternoon, especially not at this time of year when there was practically no business. There was nothing to worry about – everybody in Kentish Town watches everybody else's comings and goings anyway, suspicious or not. I smiled to myself – just in case the old coot or the Lenoir girls should be looking.

When you come out of Diagon Alley, you walk straight through the archway and there's a solid brick wall behind you. The same with the barrier at Kings Cross, and the same with the door into Coultts. It's a big gothic pointed wooden door with a central boss instead of a handle – you push it open – and then you're in the newsagents with a green curtain swinging shut behind you. The few muggles in there never notice, but I always feel slightly relieved when the place is empty, because they do stare at you as you walk past them. Today, there was nobody except Mr Coultt, perched on his high stool behind the counter with a paper hovering at reading height in front of him. He nodded; I nodded; nobody spoke. It was probably patently obvious to him that I was going through there and out into the muggle world at least twice a week more often than I used to – but as he had barely spoken to me since the Death Eater started calling at Number 17, I had to assume that meant he wasn't likely to be rushing off to share that information with Martjee Van Dyke or other mutual acquaintances.

Probably. But I still didn't need to take risks by lingering to chat. So I put my head down and hurried for the front door. That, being muggle, has a door handle. I reached out and – _"OWWW!"_

The door slammed back. My howl of a whacked wrist seemed to register no more than the bang of the door hitting the wall with the thick-set, dark-robed wizard who strode unhesitatingly in – apparently I was inaudible as well as insignificant to him. Another wizard followed – and another – and another – it was the fifth one who finally seemed to see that there was a witch squashed behind the door. A condescending arm moved the door a couple of inches forwards off my toes. "I'm sorr–"

And I was staring, eye to eye, at my Death Eater.

Eye contact is necessary for legilimency. I hoped he wasn't a legilimens, because my first thought was the two words Pam had been enquiring about. _Ewige verdammnis und dann einige und dann einige und dann einige..._

Perhaps he was thinking the same. Because we were both silent. And then my mouth moved entirely of its own volition: "It _is _you...!"

The tone made the bit of me that wasn't swearing or panicking cringe – but somehow I was smiling, too – the beaming smile I practise occasionally for using if I should ever be obliged to bump into a certain Bavarian cousin or two again – I could see it reflected in the door. "You haven't called _at all_ this week..."

Merlin's beard – now I sounded like Angela Timms with a crush on the quidditch captain – but I didn't seem able to stop. "I was just going out..." I gestured needlessly down at my travelling cloak; after all, I would hardly have been just going in, standing there behind the door "...so the shop's shut, I'm afraid..."

The Death Eater scowled – whether it was me or the shop being shut or the coarse snorts of laughter that were going off somewhere further inside Coultt's I wasn't sure, but I added another beaming smile just in case. "I won't be–"

He cut me off. "How long will you be?"

"Fifteen minutes? Twenty?" I shrugged, smiled. At least it was 'how long?' and not 'where?' – but you can't tell a Death Eater it all depends on how long the queue of muggles in the station ticket office is...

Yet his scowl lifted, brightened into the strange leer which might, I think, have been meant to be friendly or something. He stepped back, and I found myself condescendingly bowed round to the outside of the door. "Take half an hour. We've got other business."

And the door was shut, and I was standing in dead silence in the muggle street. _Dead? Why did I have to think of that adjective?_

Half an hour is thirty minutes. And a sheer eternity to spend when all you want to do is flee home. I could not hurry – but I doubt the brainless teenage blonde who ran that station will ever forget the strange woman in the long black dress who dropped two cartons of milk, knocked the stack of bakery trays over, and finally tried to pay her with a large gold coin.

"We're not a pawn shop," she said, pushing the Galleon back at me.

There was no need to sound so bloody scornful! Didn't she know real gold when she saw it, instead of this stupid flimsy paper stuff?! I slammed one of these 'Twenty' things down, got a pile of tiddly little coins back, and strode out. I had to walk – I hadn't dared apparate in case the desperate longing to not go out at all had registered higher in the determination scale, and splinched me – I just didn't seem to be able to walk fast enough. Down the road, round the corner of the muggle public baths – and the sick flicker of the old, childhood habit: to look into the sky before you opened a door.

There was no Dark Mark. There was no noise in Coultt's. The neat rows of parchment and quills and blank books and joke-hex stationery were still there. Nothing was changed, nothing was out of order. On the magical side.

The shop floor was littered with the smashed remains of the muggle newsagents: the tabloid papers, the magazines, crushed bottles of the sticky drinks muggles buy – even the old Coca-Cola posters had been torn in shreds from the windows. And there was silence. A silence so thick it seemed to choke you.

'_So?'_ it said. _'What can you do about it? We're the government, now.'_

The government. A paper still hung at reading height before the man sitting on the high stool behind the counter. He nodded; I nodded; nobody spoke. Perhaps my Death Eater didn't know quite what to say. Thank Merlin. Because on the floor, the headlines of the tabloid papers were still readable despite their torn and scrunched up state:

CORONER IN NORTHCOTE LANE TRAGEDY "UNCERTAIN" – SIX DEATHS

"WERE NOT GAS EXPLOSION"

I could not bend down to pick one up. I could never know. But it felt as if I was leaving them, all six of them, three I knew and three I had never known – dead upon the floor.

~:~

Mr Coultt had been arrested for trafficking in – _muggle goods. _The last two words said in a tone of horror appropriate to someone selling small children to hags. _Muggle goods... muggle goods... _Again and again you heard the phrase; as if some strange, polluting contraband; as if we had not all gone in and out for years past the – _muggle goods._ And everybody said it: the Nydowskis, the Corbellinis, the Van Dykes, even the Lenoirs – like a protective charm that, if you said it in a shocked and horrified tone enough, might keep you from the same fate. Because now – and everyone in Kentish Town knew it – we were trapped.

Coultt's, as a shop, was closed. Coultt's, as a Ministry check-point, was in full business. You could come and go by Floo – don't tell me they weren't busy spying like mad on that, too – but other than that, you must walk past a bored Death Eater in an empty shop. I wasn't sure which was worse: when it was one I didn't know, who glared at me and everybody else in a suspicious and unpleasant manner; or when it was the one I did know, who shot what I think he thought were smiles at me. I made it as random as I could, but I still had to go. Out, and in. Out, and in. And every now and then you'd see somebody get stopped.

_Name? Address? Blood Status? _

_Don't let it be me – not with two loaves of muggle sliced bread in my basket. _

And there was nothing that could be said about it; only 'trafficking in – _muggle goods' _– over and over again.

I could see why the Lenoirs were saying it. The reason could be plainly seen, a too-big, ginger, can-probably-talk reason, pressed for hours against their attic window. A certain amount of blood in September kept me from being tempted to drop them a hint about one way black-out charms. If people are so jolly clever about noticing other people's visitors, they can notice their own visitors sitting in their own windows.

But once again, I wasn't the only one who had noticed.

"Kneazles," said the old coot, in the middle of the morning in the middle of November, "seem to be very popular, these days..." She put her head on one side at Fifi, who had followed me downstairs when the bell rang, to sit on the end of the counter.

"They're good company," I said cheerily – and untruthfully. You could tell that wretched kneazle belonged to a Gryffindor: idiotically brave and infuriatingly cheeky. "And they're marvellous for keeping the mice down."

"We don't have–" The old coot stopped. I smiled at her. There is no point in coming in here one week to ask to borrow biscuits because the mice got in the tin and ate them, and then coming in to say you haven't got mice the next. Of course Collie & Grout have mice. We all do. The fifteenth century founders of Britain's largest magical backwater seem to have built them in – as integral an architectural element as the half-timbering and the plumbing. As everybody in Kentish Town knows. It was the end of the visit.

I went back upstairs. "You can– " I had been going to say 'make some noise now.' I had not expected somebody to burst into tears – loud, angry tears of utter desperation and fourteen.

"I can't do it!" Sally wailed, at a volume which made me sincerely hope the chilly November drizzle had deterred the old coot from lingering outside the door. "I just can't do it! It's that stupid wand! It's Julie's! It doesn't suit me! I'm not a Hufflepuff! And I can't do it! I can't Summon! And I'm getting behind! I'll never learn! I need my wand! I can't do it with that one...! I can't! I can't! I can't! Boo-hoo...!"

I considered the wailing mass coldly. There was no need to _tell_ me the wand didn't suit her – I knew it didn't! I hadn't watched wands choosing witches for seven years without learning _something,_ Thank You.

Unfortunately, wands were a problem – quite aside from the lingering grudge about living over a shop full of wands and not being able to have one. Government security checks – at Gringotts and in Coultt's and just at random anywhere – mean _Priori incantatem._ And neither Meck nor I would be able to explain a wand that had last been performing classic fourth-year magic. Pam's stuff – basic levitation, _lumos,_ elementary tranfiguration – was all so basic it could probably be passed off as household charm work. But there is no reason for turning a guinea fowl into a guinea pig – other than teaching a fourteen year old how to do so. That meant that Sally must use Julie's wand. And while Pam seemed to suit my wand nicely, the apple-and-unicorn was unsuited to a Gryffindor and inexperienced to boot. You could practically see the poor wand struggling to cope with its two different users – at least it was struggling quietly.

I needed quiet: it was Mother's birthday on Saturday, and I had to finish my knitting. Yes – knitting. Having told the house-elf I was hiding something for Mother's birthday, I was attempting to actually come up with something convincing, in the form of a scarf made of cashmere-and-demiguise yarn that I had unravelled from an old baby shawl of Meck's. Knitting charms are simple, but I still needed some peace to concentrate. The pattern was Great-great-aunt Elisaveta's, that she taught me years ago, before Meck materialised. Complex, but I could still remember it.

Mostly.

There was currently a snaggle about as tangled as the sobbing Gryffindor splutters – and neither tangle looked like they would be resolved by sympathy. So I sat down and got out a pair of scissors for the knitting and an icy glare for Sally.

"_...Can't … do … not … like … Julie..."_

"I know you're not," I said sharply. "I thought you were a noble Gryffindor, not a Hufflepuff crybaby."

For some reason, I then had two offended Lowes on my hands.

I thought that was the reason for the silence when I Flooed in the next morning. All three of them, and Meck, were in the living room. I was a bit late: I had taken advantage of needing to go to Diagon Alley to buy wrapping paper to also buy some decent wizarding bread, and proper bottles of milk, and real sausages, and so forth – the last item being comfortably explained in the Diagon butchers by an exaggerated shiver and the remark that it had turned into the sort of day for a hot lunch.

I put them down with some pride on the work surface. "Sausages." No answer. "What's the matter?" Really, there was sulking and then there was just plain silly.

"Cat sank," said Meck.

"What? Oh – the Lenoirs." People who daub blood on other people's windows are really of no importance compared to supply shopping, thank you – so I carried on unpacking. "What have they done now...?" I added after a further minute's silence.

"Cat," Meck repeated, "sank. The Death Eaters dragged her off under arrest about twenty minutes ago."

They – they – what? My mind stalled: "Well – well– well–"

"You can just say you're shocked and save on snarking," said the littlest muggle.

"I am not shocked!" I took the last loaf of bread out of the basket and slammed it into the breadbin. "She – they should have been more careful! Taunting the Van Dykes was asking for trouble! And–" I banished my cloak to its peg and looked at my watch " – it's Eleven o'clock! Three of you should have been studying, not staring out of the window!"

It did not improve my mood that they all scuttled off so meekly. Even Meck went downstairs without a single wise-crack, for Merlin's sake! An entire flat-full of white mice! Just because that stupid Catherine Lenoir, who had been dumb enough to paint 'Collaborator' on our windows, who hadn't bothered to conceal having taken Mr Coultt's Marmaduke in, had been arrested!

I slammed _History of Magic_ – always the easiest option – down in front of Pam and got my knitting out – in silence. On the other side of the room, the properties of moonstones in potions were being wrestled with – in silence. In the kitchen, the white mouse was washing the dishes – in silence.

The whinging _schnieder_ was only arrested! Arrested meant alive!

Alive meant Azkaban.

The yarn was somehow tangled again – as if someone had tied it into a knot for a prank. Somebody had, when I'd been trying to learn this pattern – a bunch of silly, ever-pranking Gryffindors had taken my bag in potions one day and tied the yarn to twelve successive chairs, so when I had got up I had practically demolished the classroom. And one of those had gone to Azkaban – like half my House-mates – and I didn't want to think about the way they looked, and the way pretty, laughing, Cat Lenoir had looked...

"Thaklia?" Pam was regarding me solemnly from the middle of Bathilda Bagshot. "About Wendolin the Weird-"

"Have you got a problem with witch burning?" I asked, racking my brains for the mediaeval period I'd long since forgotten – along with the end of this pattern, it seemed.

"She allowed herself to be caught forty-seven times." Pam shut the book. "What happens if we're caught? I've asked Julie and she won't tell me."

Caught? Caught? What made three people – three ordinary human beings - catchable? If you could be arrested for taking in somebody's stray ginger kneazle – the only crime as far as I knew that Cat Lenoir had committed – what happened if three muggle-born witches were caught?

"They would probably-" I stopped. I had been going to say 'murder the lot of you' – Slytherins don't dabble in false delicacy. But – the Death Eaters weren't going to excuse Meck, just because he was the only heir of the Coburg-Drurys – hiding mud-bloods behind their back and being bloody cheeky between times. And 'my' Death Eater was hardly going to pardon a witch who nigh on flirted with him once a week in a shop marked 'No Mud-bloods Will Be Served' while hiding, feeding and teaching magic to two under-age mud-bloods. I looked at Pam.

"They'd murder the lot of us," I said frankly. "I expect you'd guessed that."

~:~

Somehow, the fact that detection meant summary execution (although at least one would be spared the hideous sight of Dolores Umbridge) seemed less of a problem as December wore on, compared to the problem of Christmas.

Because at Christmas, shops Shut. We had managed on Sundays up until now by my insisting to Mother that I had to go in just for a few minutes, in case any urgent wand repair jobs had come in, and that it was too much to ask Meck to do it. As she quite agreed with me on that point, she was obliged to let me go. But even urgent wand repair jobs are futile in the face of the Kentish Town habit of closing down completely at Christmas. Even in normal years, The Court makes a poorer effort at Christmas shopping and jollity than Hogsmeade did the year it had Sirius Black and Dementors running about. Last year, you would have thought we were in official mourning.

I supposed a lot of people would be, this year.

Where did that leave the Lowes? Coburg-Drurys spend Christmas at home in Kingston, with a steady trickle of relations and acquaintances-in-business visiting to bring us festive cheer. At present, none of the 'festive circuit' has small children, so I'm thankfully not expected to entertain them, just make dull conversation to duller visitors, and field endless questions about why I haven't got married yet. Meck, of course, relapses back to being a big kid and everybody makes a fuss of him. The need to supply food, let alone festive cheer, to illegal muggle-born witches didn't come into the matter.

I wasted my breath asking Meck what he thought we should do about Christmas. After all, it was his girlfriend and therefore his problem. He said he was "very busy studying," and shut the workshop door in my face. _G__egabelten Holz für Zauberstäbe_! Ah – yes, sorry. That was Willem's. But I mean...

But Meck suddenly was very busy studying these days. Typical, really – that he should bring the Lowes here, and then suddenly get bored of it all. Leaving me to carry on with the mess. _He _was studying: spending hours shut in the workshop and more hours at home vanished into the reading room – he was even being silent and abstracted at dinner again. As for the Lowes, after weeks, if not months now, of sneaking upstairs at any opportunity, Meck didn't really seem to be noticing them any more. He kissed Julie vaguely on his way through from the Floo every morning, and then shut himself away downstairs. When Meck's busy, he's Busy – I get left with a choice between standing outside a locked door wasting my breath, or getting on with things myself.

_V__ielen Dank, kleiner Bruder_...so I got on with things as best I could. A Christmas tree – well, the small one from the shop, moved upstairs once we'd closed on the twenty-third. An extra tin of mince pies – "in case ..._anybody..._ should call, Mother." An end of term lesson on the conjuring and fastening up of tinsel, including enduring Sally's demonstration, to Pam, on Julie (not me, thank Merlin) of what Peeves usually did to those putting up tinsel. A selection of hopefully interesting, non-academic books smuggled out of our reading-room at home, to keep them amused. And after much thought, a present apiece. Okay – so they were only books, and only one each – but most of my salary-cum-allowance as shop manager, and a good chunk of Meck's, was going on keeping the three girls in the first place, and I was still obliged to buy presents for all my own family as well. I was tempted to spend more on them, and not get Meck anything because he didn't deserve it – but Mother would have then spend the next year or two looking at me reproachfully. So I got him a nice pair of slippers, the sheepskin lined sort he doesn't like.

I entrusted the three packages for the girls to Julie – who promptly filled up with tears. "How... how... how..."

"How what?" I snapped crossly. I wasn't in the mood for snivelling white mice.

She swallowed hard. "How am I going to send a Christmas card to Aunt Agnes...?"

Christmas cards?! "Don't be stupid!" I practically shouted. "It's not a matter of how – you can't! You might as well send one to Umbridge to tell her you're still around!"

There followed one of those Silences that some people round here were very good at – but it was true. People who are in hiding cannot send Christmas cards. It wasn't _my_ fault. And they didn't have a monopoly on "can't do" at Christmas – I was stuck too.

I came in on the twenty-third by desperate insistence that "we have to see to any last wand repair jobs before we close for the holidays, Mother."

"Her Ministry Official hasn't been to wish her Merry Christmas..." quoth the apprentice in a stage whisper I could not hex him for in front of Mother. The Death Eater did, too: we had two customers wanting repairs, which promptly brought an inspection of the Blood Status book and a highly unwelcome festive greeting. I had to return it; I had to wish Madam Van Dyke 'Merry Christmas' because she went and walked past just as I was putting the shutters up; and then I had to Go Home.

Home for three days of festive frustration, entertaining successive bunches of idiotic visitors who were all pretending that everything was all right, because it was Christmas.

There was nothing I could do about it – I didn't need to feel bad. I just felt worse when I Flooed in on the twenty-seventh – "I really do have to go and check on the shop today, Mother, with this cold weather" – and Julie actually smiled as she said "Merry Christmas," and Pam flew down the junk room stairs: "Merry-Christmas-Thaklia-you-didn't-come-and-see-us!"

And then Sally galloped down after her, beaming from ear to ear. "Merry Christmas, Thaklia! Meck fixed me a new wand!"

Somewhere, far away, Pam was prattling on about earrings for Julie and a stuffed toy owl that was going to be changed to a real post owl when she went to school – but that was all far, far away from where I was turning in slow motion to look at the idiot of a trainee wand-maker stepping out of the Floo behind me. And the idiot grinned – his smuggest, cockiest grin. "So I've been very busy studying to find out how to make a wand without a Trace..."

The littlest muggle piped up again: "And he posted that card for Aunt Agnes! With a German stamp on it so it wasn't traceable!"

I learned quite a bit of German from Willem and Schlewing, and from Great-great-aunt Elisaveta the day Meck bit her. I used all of it at him, plus a lot of English, until my throat was hoarse and the Lowes were all staring.

Slytherins don't cry, you know. I said that to Angela Timms once, that term in fifth year, when I found her bawling in our dormitory because Sirius Black had put his hand up in front of the entire Slytherin/Gryffindor Charms class and told Professor Flitwick he was sorry to interrupt but James Potter seemed to have had an accident with an engorgement charm and Miss Timms' nose, although it was hard to tell...

Angela, as I called her then, merely looked at me, blew the now normal, if amply, sized organ in question on the handkerchief I had conjured for her and said thickly: "Yeah. Not in front of Gryffindors."

Sally was a Gryffindor. Somebody else was cruel enough that he ought to have been sorted there, too. I Flooed home and locked myself in my room for so long Mother got worried, and sent the house elf to apparate in with a cup of tea. It tasted like it had a hearty spoonful of Bobbin's patent calming draught in it. I flung the whole thing in the fireplace, and myself back on the bed.

_Who had provided that for Julie to stop her turning grey from the Death Eater?! __Who had to face the atrocious wilderness of muggle shops for food, and then smuggle it back past a Death Eater guard in the closed down newsagents?! Who had to fend off the Death Eater, and keep smiling at him so he never grew suspicious?! Who had to deal with the neighbours, and put up with the hostile looks and comments, and scrub bloody writing off the window?! Who had had to live for four months in a situation she had done nothing to produce, and could do nothing about – and hadn't complained?! _

_I hadn't complained about any of it!__Not the girlfriend and not the kneazle and not the __**two**__ little sisters! __Underfoot all day! Bored and whinging and crying and doing stupid things like coming downstairs – and I had put up with it! And to deal with all of those things, I was Teaching them! Teaching them magic in the face of every prohibiting edict of a ferocious government – running the risk of getting stopped at a random wand check with a wand that had done patently obvious 'simple spells' – and he could just swoop in and come up with a new wand! The big hero with the new wand, and I was left out as the Slytherin villain who burnt the old one!_

I shuffled my face round to find a bit of pillow that wasn't soaking with rage and shame. _He hadn't even TOLD me! That was what I didn't like!_

_If you don't like it, work round it with cunning: __that's the Slytherin motto._

I had said that – but for some reason my mind returned it in the calm, politely clipped tones of the now murdered mother of Elaine Cooper to whom I had said it. A tone which made it seem even more perfectly true. I sat up.

So: I didn't like what had happened this Christmas. Nor my little brother.

Well – there was always New Year. And I _supposed_ I could work round that devilish mop of grinning angelic Coburg curls with cunning.

I unlocked my door, and went to speak to one of my ancestors.

Drury ancestors.

Grandmother Drury seven-times-removed (that is, Great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Drury) was a canny old soul. She knew which side her bread was buttered on –_ the Coburg side, she was the first one to marry out_; how not to be fazed by anything – _my current predicament with three muggle-born witches wouldn't have bothered her in the least_; and how to accurately divine the fortunes of the coming year with her old silver teapot –_ it works_.

I know this because her highly opinionated portrait in its Stuart-era ruff had been banished by an earlier descendant than me to the spare room which I then acquired as a school room for teaching Meck in. She took a great interest in his education – she took it out on me. But from somewhere, out of all the snarky comments, I had gleaned one or two useful gems of information that she felt a seven-times-removed granddaughter of hers ought to know. Like that a circular wand motion was better for cleaning windows –_ Stradivaria Corbellini __is always__ drop__ping__ enquiring hints about __our "__beautifully__ shiny glass"_; that a _Tigrusia_ charm was far more effective for deterring rodents than a cat, and never needed its litter tray cleaning – _useful with no house-elf_; that pink soap bubbles were the best cure for profanity in small boys – _Meck didn't speak to her for a month after I'd proved that one worked_; that you could run a shop even if you couldn't make wands – _she'd traded solo on a back stock of wands for four years before catching her Coburg_; that if you didn't like a man you shouldn't marry him –_ I don't know if that one was from personal experience_; and, of course, what the tea pot was for.

Tea out of it tastes vile, three quarters silver polish and one quarter tea leaves, but it's the tea leaves you're after. It's not a bit like the rubbish fortune telling Professor Trelawny churns out: Grandmother Drury claims that it's centaur magic. That must, I know, be impossible. Centaurs are not given to sharing their methods with wizards – but if anyone was going to get an accurate Divination method out of a centaur, it would be Grandmother Drury.

I shut the door to stop the house-elf coming in – although it was probably busy whinging in my room over the broken tea cup in the fire – and went over to tap politely on the picture frame.

Grandmother Drury took one look at me, and told me what I had once said to Angela Timms. Drurys say what they mean, and are supposed to give as good as they get – as she herself told me one time when I was arguing with a thirteen year old Meck over whether or not I was explaining boggarts 'unclearly.' So I smiled back at her:

"I wasn't crying. I was just shedding gallons of saline liquid as an expression of sheer rage. Tell me, does that teapot work for anybody who drinks out of it, not just family?"

~:~

It took Meck four days, right up until New Year's Eve, to come and find me, in the kitchen where I was getting – something – organised, and mutter: "I'm-sorry-didn't-tell-you."

I turned my back; _I_ was busy. "Who told you to say that, then? Your Hufflepuff conscience or your Gryffindor one?"

Now excuse me – I'm only an insignificant shop manager.

I supposed, as I headed upstairs, that it may not have been any of the Lowes who caused Meck to apologise, for Mother had noticed our sudden cessation of communication enough for me to have overheard her yesterday evening telling Meck that "They were really very nice slippers Thaklia gave you, dear." I presume she thought that was why we weren't speaking.

_Forget it, Mother – he knows exactly what they mean... _

I just wished I knew how he had slipped out at Christmas.

My whereabouts are not of particular importance, but neither can I vanish for hours unless I want to answer a thousand dangerous questions on my return. And I am not normally in the habit of going out for New Year – Coburg-Drurys are not exactly the partying type, but we do continue our round of festive visitors with a smattering of Joders-who-live-in-London – Mother's relations – sitting around waiting for the clock to strike twelve.

I had spent four days turning over dozens of ideas:

I could announce I had been asked out – but that would just fuel the gossip Meck had been spreading (who else would have told eighty year old Second-Cousin-twice-removed Alfriedus Joder I 'had' a Ministry official?) – and besides, what if Mother told me to invite him here?

I could say someone in Kentish Town had asked me over for the afternoon, and then just not come back – but then Mother would want to know why they hadn't asked Meck. And who would I say? The Lenoirs?

I could refuse to say where I was going, "because Meck would tell everybody" – but that would go down as a worse lead broomstick than "I'm going out this evening because we've three muggle-born witches hiding in the shop and I'm damned if Meck's going to monopolise them for New Year like he did for Christmas."

Headaches are no good as excuses at all round here: headaches mean a house-elf in your room with a bottle of Bobbin's Patent Headache draught. Mother has the entire set of Bobbin's Patent Draughts, in case Father might ever need them. This is followed by a week's worth of dumb Mecklenburgian jokes about hang-over cures.

Cunning... that was what I needed. So in the end, I packed everything I had been – getting organised – in the usual basket, made sure I spoke to all the Joders on their arrival, got Meck well and truly stuck in a one-sided conversation with Mrs Second-Cousin-twice-removed Alfriedus, and then slipped out to find the house-elf.

"I've been asked out by a friend in Kentish Town," I said firmly, pulling my cloak on in the hall while the house-elf held the basket. "So I'm meeting him there. If Mother notices I've gone, don't tell her. And stop peeking under that basket lid."

I got a sullen look back: feelings about house-elves and Thaklias are reciprocal. "Then what is I to say?"

I took the basket, and lifted down the can of Floo powder. "Refer her to Meck!" _Just for once, somebody could come up with a marvellous excuse Really on the spur of the moment... _"Number 17, Kentish Town!"

At least it doesn't matter in the Floo how much you do or don't want to get to your destination. A broomstick can tell you're nervous, and apparition will splinch you happily, but Floo powder just chucks you out regardless of whether or not you are beginning to be sick of the whole idea, worrying if Meck has actually been back to deliver food, or regretting anything you might have said last time (_Evige verdammnis_ and all that).

The Floo just chucks you out – to several bumps, squeals, and a Gryffindor pointing a wand at you: "Stop! You're covered!"

_Typical!_ "Put that wand down before you take your eye out," I snapped back, pulling the basket out from under my cloak. I was _not_ covered in ash – and of all the things to worry about, the carpet wasn't one of them!

"Thaklia...?" said the white mouse weakly.

"_Yes..." _I replied heavily, wondering why, exactly, I had wanted anything to do with this bunch of idiots for New Year, instead of the related equivalent at home. "But I would still say that even if I was a Death Eater impersonating myself, you know."

Pam got up, and stood just behind the still-wand-pointing Sally. "Have you come to see us?"

_One more stupid question, and I might go home..._ "No, I've come to see how long it takes Meck to notice I've vanished."

For some reason, the littlest muggle promptly beamed. "You can put your wand down, Sally; it's her."

'Her' had a feeling somebody was being outdone in cunning round here. A feeling promptly confirmed: "You do tell us it could be anyone in the Floo..."

_Which meant not to hang about in front of the fireplace, not try and hex me!_

"Well, it's me," I said grumpily. "Did you try and hex Meck at Christmas?"

"He gives us some warning," said Sally, sounding rather disgruntled that her efforts at a gallant last stand had been ignored. "And we only had Julie's wand, then."

_Thank Merlin..._ I pushed past towards the kitchen corner. The white mouse followed me uncertainly. "Has, er – has Meck, er– "

_Ah, it was his Hufflepuff conscience, then. _

"Spoken exactly four words to me in the last four days," I said briskly, plonking the basket on the work surface and lifting the well-wrapped silver teapot out. "But they were intended in the nature of an apology, so yes, thank you. Here, hold this."

She took the teapot. "What is it?"

_What does it look like...?_ "It is my Grandmother Drury seven-times-removed's silver teapot, which–"

There was a squawk from the white mouse. "It made a face!"

"Of course it did. That's what it does." _Really, how had she survived Hogwarts?_ "Meck used to spend hours making them back."

I should not have said that. Because the two younger Lowes promptly swooped down to remove the teapot from Julie, and then spent the next twenty minutes emulating Meck, while the teapot retaliated in style.

"I didn't just bring that for amusement," I said eventually.

The littlest muggle made one last, awful face, and looked up. "Are you running away with the family silver?"

The Floo flared up green, and my doings with the teapot were instantly forgotten. Sally drew her wand again – typical Gryffindor – I marched past her to the hearth.

"Out!" I ordered, as the spinning mop of blonde curls slowed. "It's a good thing you came through now – half an hour later and you'd have been splinched in the middle of next year's fortunes."

He blinked.

"We _were_ expecting you," I pointed out. "The sound of opening cake tins is generally as good as a summoning charm, even at a distance, and I didn't imagine you were going to spend the entire rest of the year listening to Mrs Alfriedus' illustrated medical encyclopaedia."

There was a short and deeply silent pause. And then Meck made a face that beat even the teapot: "And _Evige Verdammnis_ to you too."

"Pink soap bubbles!" I retorted. "Get out of the fireplace so I can sweep."

At least on my knees sweeping the hearth clear of ashes, I was looking away from Meck and Julie, although Pam's remark of "D'you _have _to?" denied me any opportunity of pretending blissful ignorance.

Sally came and crouched down beside me. "What about next year's fortunes?" she asked, in a desperately loud Gryffindor attempt to change the subject.

"Ah..." I sat back, and vanished the little pile of hearth ashes. "Well, it is a _Drury_ habit" – the Coburg in the room made a particularly loud and unnecessary noise – "to mark the new year in a _useful_ manner, by – "

"_...snarking..." _quoth the apprentice.

" – predicting the coming year's fortunes. I presume you three _were_ all sitting up to see in the New Year, and are not in the habit of sitting up until eleven at night normally. And that," I got up, "is what the teapot is for."

"Divination..." Sally began sceptically.

"Is extremely fishy in its school-taught form," I finished. On that subject, Gryffindors and Slytherins are agreed. "This is different. This is Grandmother Drury's, and she got it from a centaur."

The sceptic, for once, seemed impressed.

"What difference does that make?" said the littlest muggle.

"It means," said Meck, cheerful now that he had – finished – and I was looking daggers at someone else, "That Thaklia has had enough of us, and wishes to poison us all with the vile 'tea' that teapot makes. And will also refuse to let us put sugar in it."

I raised my wand – for some reason he ducked – and summoned the basket. It was quarter to midnight, which didn't leave us time for such juvenile idiocy.

"Strictly," I explained as I set out the bundle of holly logs from the basket and set them blazing, "This is for family, but Grandmother Drury agreed that under the circumstances" – it wasn't necessary to finish the sentence, only to look back at the hearth. "What did you tell Mother, by the way?" I enquired over my shoulder.

"Nothing compared to what I told Mrs Alf."

"Mecklenburg!"

My wretched little brother picked up the teapot, sloshed it around to check it had water in, and handed it innocently to me. "_Aguamenti, _or did you remember it has to be rainwater?"

_Of course I remembered it had to be rainwater..._I stuck the teapot to hover over the fire, and whacked it with my wand to hurry it up. It is supposed to boil by the heat of the flames, but a little warming charm never hurts anyone. And in case you think I am mad, putting a family heirloom silver teapot in the fire, this is _centaur _magic – they don't have kettles, but have to boil everything in a pot over an open fire. So I had been told. I had been instructed repeatedly for four days in every detail and then some. Grandmother Drury had, in fact, been jolly keen on the idea – I think she was rather sorry I couldn't bring her to see. Although some things, I hope, she wouldn't have wanted to see. I certainly didn't. Three of us watched the fire in silence until the teapot boiled.

I summoned the packet of tea rather than look round, and put in five spoonfuls. "Five – one each."

"Six," said the Gryffindor at my elbow earnestly. "One for Fifi."

_If kneazles do not drink milk, do they drink tea...? _

The answer, apparently, is 'yes' – and they sit on their owner's knee and purr hopefully while waiting for the two minutes brewing. A china tea cup for each party, a saucer for the wretched kneazle, and we were done. Five minutes to midnight.

"Cheers. If it tastes vile" – I summoned the large tin I had brought – "have a biscuit. It's the tea leaves you're after."

It is what Grandmother Drury called 'an acquired taste' – but if you have one eye on the clock ticking rapidly down to next year, and one hand on a large stack of Spritz biscuits, it is possible to drink the stuff without too much difficulty. The white mouse made discrete choking noises – the Gryffindor louder ones – and Pam promptly coughed and gasped and spluttered.

"What is it?!"

"Poison," I retorted. "Just don't do what Meck did."

She stopped spluttering: "Which was?"

I swallowed the last mouthful of mine and stood up. "He can tell you." There was an irate yelp from the party in question – serve him right.

It was, by the way, throwing up right on the hearth rug age twelve. Meck and Mother both said it was the 'vile tea'. I felt that having eaten an entire box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans between lunch and midnight might have had more to do with it – but that was a minority opinion, and the incident was the end of the New Year's fortune telling. Still, that meant I had been able to bring the teapot unnoticed today.

"If you've all done..." I announced, by way of giving Meck a temporary reprieve from interrogation – and another reason to glare at me.

_You're welcome__ … told Mrs __Alf__ indeed..._

"I have, I have!" Sally grabbed up her teacup again, and peered into it with the great self-importance of someone who started Divination last year. "And it looks, er... like–"

"A round, dark, soggy stranger," I filled in, holding out the small silver bowl this process uses. "Tea leaves, please."

"But – " The Gryffindor clutched her teacup defensively as everyone else poured theirs in – Meck looking bored and the other two girls puzzled. "But – "

"This," I said firmly, "is where centaur magic differs from a hash-up in a school teacup. The proper way to tell fortunes in tea leaves is to burn them, and watch the flame colours. You can judge from shapes in the fire too, but Grandmother Drury always says that takes too much practice. And the trick to get it to do for the whole year's fortunes is to put them in at the last stroke of midnight. So," I looked at the clock, "we have forty seconds to wait."

It sounds ridiculous, once you've explained it – far too simple. Unless you bear in mind that we had all sat or stood here before, and seen a Gryffindor wand flare red and gold as it burned.

Sally seemed to be pondering this, or something. "I never got Firenze," she said sadly at twenty seconds. "I only got Professor Trelawny."

"You were better off than I was," Meck leaned forwards with a cheeky grin. "I only got Thaklia."

_Vielen Dank–!_ I did not have an Icelandic Saga to pitch at him – it would have been a sad waste to chuck the tea leaves – but – !

"_Nox!"_ I flicked the lights out with a very sharp wand jerk – and the clock struck. One! Two! Three! Four! I suppose we were actually a prime target if any Death Eaters should have planned a raid for New Year, but hopefully they were all either at home or – somewhere else. Nine! Ten! Eleven! And... Twelve!

And I tipped the tea leaves into the crackling flames. "For a Happy New Year. Now keep your fingers crossed that the fire doesn't go out."

The littlest muggle, of course, asked the question. "What does it mean if it does?"

"That we've all drunk this vile brew of silver polish to absolutely no avail..." Meck – thank Merlin – put in his explanation fast enough to get a laugh all round, not an awkward silence. He did, of course, have to then give me a very cheeky grin that said 'aren't you glad you didn't hex me after all' – but we both knew what the fire going out would mean.

It was probably a stupid piece of Divination to pick, under the circumstances – but we'd started now. So we watched the fire.

The flame had died back with a hiss, back into the wood. And it crawled, slowly, tortuously, through the wood – creeping and glowing as though it thought to stay hidden. The darkness pressed round it, as it pressed round the five watchers, above, below, in front – no light spilled from the fire even as far as the hearth edge.

I couldn't see – but the rustle of movement made me believe that Meck was taking advantage of my not being able to see, to put his arm round Julie. I shot a glare he couldn't see into the darkness in that direction. A muffled Mecklenburgian snigger showed I had been right.

The flame crawled, and the shadows darkened. Darker, darker. If there was a flame colour at all, I couldn't see it, only a faint glow of light – hiding, hiding...

_Grandmother Drury, what if it just does this – for the whole year? What if –? What if –?_

Red light, so bright it hurt your eyes – Red for war – the crack of an exploding log – a burst of gold as bright as sunrise – and yellow, yellow – bright, snapping flames with light that poured out of the hearth into the very corners of the room – light, out of the darkness, that made Sally and Pam both jump up laughing – perhaps because the wretched kneazle was rolling on her back purring in front of the hearth...

"_Lumos! Lumos!"_ Meck flicked the lamp back on as the fire gave its ending sizzle and vanished, as it always somehow does, in a twist of flame and ash up the chimney. "Well, O Sibyl of Drurys?"

I didn't _think_ I could hex him into the middle of _next _year – so I gave in – and laughed. Centaur magic – is not nonsense. And so: "I think – I think with that much light, there _may_ be a great deal of happiness coming for us after a war this year."

**~:~:~:~:~**

_**A/N: This is, really, the end of the story – but there will be an epilogue: short, sweet, and soon – I promise!**_

_**Reviews will not be snarked at! **_


	4. Wir von einem Blut, dir sein un

Chapter 4. _W__ir von einem Blut, dir sein und ich_

What, after all, is happiness?

It wasn't the long, slow months that followed – living, hiding, waiting...

It wasn't the 2nd of May, when the world went madly ecstatic, because right in the middle of reading the liberated Prophet, with its screaming headlines of "THE BOY WHO LIVED" etc, etc, I looked up to see that Meck, Sally and Pam had disappeared – in the direction of the Van Dykes' windows.

They didn't smash them, of course. As Meck put it: "Un, deux, trois, Cat smash." The Lenoirs had got there first. In fact, it had only been Meck's talent for brilliant excuses on the spur of the moment, with Pam and Sally as primary evidence, that had kept our windows from going next. It somewhat took the edge off the day.

Happiness was not the crazy summer that followed, either, in which all of Kentish Town knew we'd had three muggle-borns in hiding and went out of their way to make ridiculously admiring noises. _ Yes, I know you all thought I was a collaborator! It's over! Stop fawning!_

And happiness was certainly not the evening of the thirty-first of August, kneeling on the floor of the top attic, packing school trunks. In Silence. We had been on what Meck termed "The Great Girls Shopping Trip" – he, thank Merlin, hadn't come – and to speed things up, Julie had gone to buy the potions supplies while I took Sally and Pam to Flourish & Blotts for school books. Where the idiotic sales assistant had taken them for MY daughters! Mine! _Evige Verdamnis!_

They had kindly refrained from mentioning this to Meck – yet. But they did keep bursting into non-explained giggles at ridiculously frequent intervals, that did not stop when I said it Wasn't Funny.

Hence, silence. I picked up another pile of new robes and laid them in Pam's trunk. Three Lowes watched me. Julie had tried to help, but I had vetoed that when her ideas of packing turned out to seem to involve tossing everything in and then sitting on the trunk lid to get it to shut. There was a way to go about this! It was like the packed lunches for the train tomorrow: the white mouse had gone and suggested canned tuna fish with sliced bread! Cheese and tomato sandwiches with real bread, a pork pie each, spritz biscuits, gingernuts, a slab of fruit cake, a dozen early russet apples from the tree at home and two Sickles to top it all up from the lunch trolley – I only hoped that would work out to be enough. It was, as far as I could remember, roughly what Mother and our then house elf had used to send me to Hogwarts with – but then, I had not been a locust like some other people round here!

The house elf had looked quite suspicious when I asked for all that stuff – but I, for once, wasn't bothering: "Mind your own business, and don't tell Mother!"

Ah, yes, you've guessed. **I** hadn't told Mother. How would I have explained it, anyway? _Hello Mother, we've had Meck's girlfriend and little sisters living over the shop for nine months with every risk of all of us getting murdered by Death Eaters for having them there...? _I didn't think so.

Meck – after much prompting – _had_ brought Julie home for dinner and introduced her. No need for anybody to have worried there: this being our parents and this being Meck, he could have brought a hippogriff home for dinner and said he was going to marry it, and that would have been just perfect. I sighed, and slammed another pile of stuff into the trunk. Tomorrow, at least, there would be peace and quiet. Peace... and quiet... and nobody... I squelched on that thought. Slytherins are _not_ sentimental. Most of the time.

"Are you coming to see us off, tomorrow?" Sally broke into my meditations, from her perch on the end of the bed holding that Kneazle. It was a very necessary task, because the Kneazle had no intention of missing out on a milk diet from the Hogwarts house elves again this year, and was trying to ensure it by getting packed in the trunks.

"No – I'm – not," I retorted grumpily from the depths. "Julie's taking you. You don't need a vast farewell committee."

The holder of the Kneazle might have said 'Oh' – but I wasn't sure, because the littlest muggle butted in:

"Of course she's not coming, Sally. She can't wait to get shut of us, so she can start cleaning this place from top to bottom like a house-elf or a German _hausfrau._"

She WHAT?!

I sat up with such speed I bashed my head on the trunk lid, which promptly closed with a bang – fortunately with me on the outside. "I am NOT a German _hausfrau_, _vielen dank_!"

An expression of perfect innocence: "But it will look like you are, if you don't come and see us off..."

"_Fraulien_!" I bellowed. "_Junge __Fraulien!_ I know EXACTLY which House you're going to be sorted into tomorrow!" I grabbed up another book and slammed it down on the trunk lid for emphasis. "And I _pity_ Professor Slughorn!"

The owner of the kneazle toppled backwards off the bed end with snort of laughter; the white mouse had a sort of muffled explosion in a pillow, but the littlest Slytherin just sat down on Sally's trunk and pulled as maudlin a face as twelve years old can:

"Hogwarts _will_ be fun – but I don't suppose any of the Professors there are going to swear at me in German..."

_~:~:~The End – und dann einige! ~:~:~_

**_A/N: A very long wait, but finally finished - Thank you for reading!_**


End file.
